Everything I read about recovering from burnout is like “it takes months or even years to fully recover” and it’s like okay…. I have a weekend before I gotta clock in on Monday
theres a phenomenon that happens on here i have been calling "normalize loving parents posting" which is when you spend a lot of time on tumblr and are exposed to a lot of one specific counter-cultural narrative day in and day out until you start to forget what the dominant ideas are for most of the human population and thus feel the need to "defend" things that are widely accepted and popular. it's called this because of the time a bunch of text posts about shitty dads were circulating and then people with good relationships with their dad didn't feel included enough and started making "uhmmm can we normalize loving parents? not everyone has a deadbeat dad, MY dad is great" type posts, seemingly forgetting that good relationship with dad is a cultural norm that is expected and encouraged. i think its good practice, especially when im annoyed, to stop before i hit the post button and ask myself if this is a real issue or if im normalize loving parents posting. because often im about to try to normalize loving parents
not every mutual fits neatly into an archetypal medievalism but there are some mutuals that im like yeah addressing you as “my liege” would come strangely naturally
I don't read as much fic as I used to but one "tell" for non Canadians writing us, besides the etransfer, is the units you use to describe us measuring something. I hate to tell you this but The Chart is real and it's completely subconscious. Please abide
One of the funny things about "Heated Rivalry" popularity for me is that I haven't really had the opportunity to do so much mental "Canadian-picking" while reading fanworks before. The phrase, "Aw, yeah, no, it for sure doesn't work like that over here, bud, sorry," is getting SO much use.
comic about the chainsaw man ending (continued below cut)
The end thanks for reading.
Inside cover on the print book where you can spot everyone
I'll put up bonus content and add alt text and all that good stuff later... and also properly promote the free printable booklet PDF + print book preorder sale too...
After school care pulled me aside about my child dropping an f-bomb “without remorse” and I put on my concerned face and nodded a bunch.
Apparently he was building something with a younger kid “who really looks up to him and is just starting to make friends” and said “Hey, you’re really fucking good at this.” which is, in my estimation, really a parenting victory.
Naruto Roleswap AU: Genma's Horrible Babysitting Job feat. Box Dimension
Genma had tried being A Good ANBU for the first week. Tobi interpreted this as weakness, and went after that professional facade ruthlessly until he gave up and started acting like a normal person. It was boring chattering at someone all day, and Kushina really needed the adult company. And Tobi liked to torment people. What were they gonna do about it?
Tobi wobbled on his handstand before crashing to the ground. Kushina used to enjoy doing handstands and gymnastics with him until she really couldn’t. They’ll get back on that grind soon! Tobi will teach the baby backflips! “Tobi’s gonna teach the baby backflips!”
Genma tilted his head, amused. “Infant calisthenics aren’t going to happen for another couple of years.”
Damn, he didn’t say now. “Tobi can wait three years!”
“A bit more than three years.”
“Tobi learned when he was three?”
“Tobi was special.” Not anymore, suckers. “Why don’t you double check and make sure everything in the nursery is ready?”
In which Obito has like the third worst day of his life which is really really really really really impressive.
Genma's the star of this particular show and I really love him. Babysitter extraordinaire. He's going to show up a lot going forward. Because I love him.
The reblog/like ratio tends to be skewed for stories, so if you enjoy the story reblog so other people can see it and enjoy it too! Story under the cut.
“Do you think they’re done yet?!”
Genma - sorry, Sparrow - continued sharpening his senbon on the kitchen table. There was a high chair off to the side, in a place of honor. It had been a gift from a woodworker in the Uzushio district. Kushina had cried. Kushina had actually been crying about a lot of stuff, but that was normal. Tobi had gotten in the habit of running and fetching her mochi about it. Woman could not hold two thoughts in her head at the same time, so she couldn’t be sad and eating at the same time.
“Not since the last time you asked,” Genma said. Tobi really wanted somebody to give him an award after this. He loved to recognize people for their heroic efforts. He would have to gush about him to Sensei, give some real customer feedback. “Go back to your show.”
“Tobi’s too excited!” Tobi was choosing to express this excitement by hopping on the couch and hopping back off again. They really expected him to sit still all day! You’d get hyperactive too if you never got to do any exercise that strained yourself. “The baby’s going to be a boy for sure! Tobi made the baby a toy, do you want to see it!”
“I saw you make it.”
There really hadn’t been a lot to do on the road. Tobi did a lot of mental chakra exercises whenever he was bored, and he was kind of worried that he was unlocking a nature sage’s path because he had nothing else to do. Hiding that from the ninja around was another fun double-tasking skill.
“Tobi’s going to learn a lot more sewing and make baby clothes!” Tobi backflipped off the couch, landing easily on one hand and pulling a handstand. “You should get some hobbies, Sparrow.”
Sparrow lazied on a chair at the kitchen table, running each senbon one by one over the sharpening block with lazy inefficiency. That was his ‘stressed out’ senbon sharpening technique.
“My job takes up most of my time.”
Tobi hopped a little, switching hands. “What’s your job, Sparrow?”
“I take trips with you and Kushina.”
“You get paid to do vacations?!”
With the grim resignation of a veteran returning from war, Genma said, “This was not a vacation.”
Genma had tried being A Good ANBU for the first week. Tobi interpreted this as weakness, and went after that professional facade ruthlessly until he gave up and started acting like a normal person. It was boring chattering at someone all day, and Kushina really needed the adult company. And Tobi liked to torment people. What were they gonna do about it?
Tobi wobbled on his handstand before crashing to the ground. Kushina used to enjoy doing handstands and gymnastics with him until she really couldn’t. They’ll get back on that grind soon! Tobi will teach the baby backflips! “Tobi’s gonna teach the baby backflips!”
Genma tilted his head, amused. “Infant calisthenics aren’t going to happen for another couple of years.”
Damn, he didn’t say now. “Tobi can wait three years!”
“A bit more than three years.”
“Tobi learned when he was three?”
“Tobi was special.” Not anymore, suckers. “Why don’t you double check and make sure everything in the nursery is ready?”
Tobi slithered upright, in a fluid and graceful motion that Kushina openly envied. Tobi liked gymnastics because Tobi had to fucking move. “Okay!”
The vacation had been a great idea.
It was Tobi’s, naturally. All of the best ideas were Tobi’s. He let other people think they came up with the idea, and he told Minato outright. Minato didn’t fall for shit like that. Guy had his number now. Tobi hated it when people had his number. By the end of it, he couldn’t get anything past Rin. Beyond the obvious.
The pregnancy had been a royally stupid idea that Sensei and Kushina would always make. They wanted to be parents so badly. Tobi really hadn’t understood it at all. He couldn’t understand choosing a desire when it was so dangerous. Granted, most Hokage dealt with the first problem at one point in their lives. One had even dealt with the second! You know, maybe Konoha had a lot of stupid kages.
There was no keeping the pregnancy secret. The minute people knew, the assassinations would flood in. The guards told Kushina that she had to stay in the house for, like, six months. That was, like, not happening. It just straight up wasn’t happening. So Tobi got antsy and Tobi started whining about how Sensei was working all the time and I want to take a vacation!
“Shit,” Sensei had said, when Tobi wandered into a very serious security meeting in their living room. You couldn’t keep him out of anything. “That’s perfect.”
Everybody was too professional to look confused or incredulous.
“Vacation it is.” Sensei stood up, rolling up the map of Konoha. “Start planning for an S-rank escort mission out of Konoha two weeks from now, and buy a vacation home in -”
“Hot Springs!” Tobi cheered. “Hot Springs! Neechan wants Hot Springs!”
“Land of Hot Water. It’s settled.”
Sensei had a reputation as an eccentric. It wasn’t totally Tobi’s fault, but he wasn’t innocent.
It took the security team fifteen minutes to realize why a vacation to Hot Springs was the best idea. Any assassin could see through a henge, and the pregnancy had to be hidden. Kushina had to disappear, and going undercover in a foreign land was the way to do it. Hot Water was famously extremely pacifistic - a land with an income one hundred percent based on tourism was not about to allow dangerous travel. Almost every ninja’s only job was to get people safely to and from the hot springs. Biggest issue was competitors trying to take each other out. Not a minor issue, but generally not a tourist’s problem.
And every pregnant and wealthy lady on the continent wanted to spend months in a hot spring resort. Needle in a haystack.
Genma was Sensei’s best bodyguard, so he was the bodyguard. He also had experience babysitting Tobi, which was not below his dignity whatsoever. And he definitely didn’t detest it. And Tobi definitely didn’t make it as below his dignity as physically possible. Ninjas took themselves way too seriously sometimes. It was what Tobi liked about Genma - he had the most important job in the village, but he was always relaxed about it. This was how Tobi treated people he liked!
The vacation was great. Pregnancy was never comfortable, but Kushina was living the high life. Tobi didn’t like the hot springs that much - none of them were hot? - but the water was nice. Tobi was very sweet to the resort staff, who all cooed over him and told Kushina that she was an angel for looking after him. Kushina had to bite her tongue hard. Tobi had to surreptitiously kick her. Hard.
Tobi’s excitement over his new baby brother - that was how Kushina kept saying it - was infectious. Kushina had been almost bouncing off the walls excited too. They hyped each other up a lot, and whenever one of them had an impulsive idea the other always enabled it, and the stupidity was squared. Genma didn’t want to kill himself yet, so Tobi summoned Bull and had him running around too. Genma was not able to put his foot down about this one, since Bull had decided All On His Own to be Very Helpful and run around fetching things for Kushina and helping her avoid moving so she could rest.
Rumors had to be spreading. If a newlywed wife mysteriously found something far away to do, you knew what was happening. Tobi helped out by very discreetly implying that Kushina had found a treatment for his you know what in Hot Water. Through an extensive series of other mechanisms, he managed to get four other rumors spread. Kushina running off to rendezvous with her secret lover in Hot Water and using ‘taking Tobi on a vacation’ as an excuse was a huge hit. With a few other well-placed brags and extremely public acts of obnoxiousness, Tobi had convinced a lot of people closer to Sensei that he had asked Kushina to take him just so he could have a fucking break from Tobi.
“Thanks for your help,” Sensei said, ruffling Tobi’s hair. “But you don’t need to work so hard, you know?”
Impossible. Tobi made a show of whistling, sticking his hands behind his back as if he’d been caught sneaking into a cookie jar. “Tobi doesn’t know what Sensei means!”
“You’ll always be a ninja.” Sensei smiled at him, weak and bright. “Now, you’re a ninja in your own way.” Tobi pulled a familiar ‘Tobi hates ninjas forever and if you ask Tobi to do ninja things he’s going to scream forever’ face. Most of the jounin were openly jealous of this. “You’re right. That’s not the most important thing, is it? You protect your precious people in your own way.”
And Tobi didn’t even want to deny that one. He didn’t even want to be bad at it.
He would really have to step up after the baby gets here. Kushina couldn’t worry about taking care of him at all. He’d be a top babysitter! Say that the responsibility matured him a bit. Older siblings always matured when they had younger siblings to take care of, right? Not Itachi, who physically could not mature any more than he already was, but right?
A more mature Tobi would mean a lot more freedom…Kushina would be too busy to wonder where he was disappearing off to…ANBU guards would be more focused on the baby than him…he could frame somebody for baby assassination attempts, he’s already done that with himself twice…
And: baby!
The nursery was fine, Genma just wanted thirty seconds of silence. Tobi gave him five minutes, just to be nice. Tobi poked his head out of the doorway, ready to call a cheerful affirmation of nursery perfection, but he stopped short.
Genma was speaking to his hawk summons. Tobi couldn’t see his face through that mask, but it didn’t matter. Tobi knew that look in any ninja. At this point, especially Genma.
There were a few ways for Tobi to protect his precious people. But there was one thing that Tobi really couldn’t do anything about.
Still. “Nursery’s in ship shape, Captain!” Tobi called, running in. “Oh, hi, Hawky! Your feathers look nice today.”
“Keep me posted,” Sparrow told the hawk. She trilled, flapped her wings once, and with a final hand seal she was gone.
“Can we eat?” Tobi asked Genma. Talking to a summon wouldn’t be a cause for alarm. “It’s dinnertime and I want miso.”
Genma sighed. The table was clear of senbon, and a go-pack was already stashed at his feet. He had gotten Tobi’s pack too. Tobi slowly felt his stomach drop.
“We’re going to eat later. Tobi, take your things and follow me.”
“I wanna eat now, I’m hungry!”
Sparrow was very calm and light. As if nothing was happening. “Tobi. I need you to listen to me, alright?” Tobi straightened, eyes widening. “The Hokage told you that in an emergency, you need to do everything I say and you need to do it very well. Do you remember that?”
Something cold was spreading. “Is this an emergency?”
“There’s no reason to worry. We’re just really careful with your safety.” Genma grabbed both their packs, slinging them over his shoulders. “Follow me. And stick close, alright? We’re being really careful right now.”
“Sparrow,” Tobi said, “what’s happening?”
“Let’s go.”
The Hokage’s apartment was on a top floor of Hokage tower. Genma took them down, and kept going down. Tobi tried to grab onto Genma’s hand, but Genma lightly shook him off. Expecting a fight.
Sirens began wailing. Genma didn’t change the pace - calm but quick. For security, the upper floors of the tower didn’t have a single stairwell - it was built like a maze instead, with each stairwell at a separate point. There were even a lot of genjutsu layered around the upper floors of the tower. Tobi had been keyed in a very long time ago.
Ninjas passed them, running as quickly as they safely could. A couple stopped and tried to debrief Genma on something, but he just made a hand signal and they zipped away.
Halfway down the tower, the building lurched. Tobi just barely remembered not to anchor his feet to the floor before they all went careening. Genma quickly caught him anyway, and Tobi screamed in surprise at the building lurched again. Distantly, something was crashing.
The pillars of the building shook. Tobi had a sudden and extremely clear sense that the top few floors of the building had been knocked off. As if by a giant’s hand. Or…
Tobi scrambled to hang onto Genma, still screaming. Right in his ear - sorry about that. “Sparrow!”
“It’s going to be fine.” They may as well be on the cart coming back to Konoha. They might as well be in that resort in Hot Spring. The world might as well have been ending, for all that Genma showed. “Let’s do a piggyback ride, okay?”
It would be much faster for both of them if Tobi just ran by his side. Much safer for Genma, and for Tobi too. But nothing about Konoha was safe, and Tobi’s commitment to this outweighed the safety of everybody else around him, because Tobi was kind of a terrible person, and he let Genma swing him onto his back.
The trip downwards was ludicrously fast after that. Sirens blared, tinny and raw, and Tobi heard an endless cacophony of crashes below them. He had just enough time to imagine people being impaled on kunai or his small hands around a throat as he strangled them to death before - before Genma finished doing a complicated series of counter-jutsus and took them through a trap door.
They fell through the stairwell, and Genma landed them neatly on the ground. The room he shepherded Tobi into was almost completely bare - cement floors, cement walls, and basic living accouterments around. Futons, boxes of MREs, and an area separated by a curtain to use the bathroom and wash.
Genma closed the door and bolted it. He did a lot more jutsus on it, then did a lot more jutsus on the space, before he was finally done.
Tobi could just barely see the exhale. Out of the mask, he would have slumped entirely from sheer exhaustion and relief. Tobi saw his fingers tap a small staccato on the metal handle of the door. Not a signal - just a familiar thought.
Then he turned around, and he was just the same as ever. Tobi was shaking from fright. It was fun. Genma had to act all cool and collected and emotionless, and Tobi got to be as upset as he wanted. Granted, he had to act five times as upset as he was.
“Why are we in somebody’s house?” Tobi asked, referring to the basement secure panic bunker for the Hokage’s family. This place had five different secret passageways to evacuate the people inside into escape routes out of the city. Nobody’s tried invading Konoha in, like, a hundred years. But it was probably useful back then!
“This place is for us. It’s a safe place for us to wait until it’s safe to go out again.” Genma dropped their packs, grabbing his and unlatching the big radio transceiver strapped to the side. He grabbed a case of headphones from inside the backpack. After a second’s consideration, he knelt in front of Tobi’s backpack and withdrew some of his puzzles. Wow. Necessary emergency supplies: shut him up for five minutes. “You need to stay very quiet, okay? We might be here for a while.”
“This isn’t our house!” Tobi protested. Genma started setting up the transceiver radio. “What’s wrong, Sparrow?”
Genma fiddled with the dials. Harsh screeches came from every channel. “I need to listen to the radio, which means it has to be quiet. I’ll answer your questions later.”
“Sparrow! Tell me now!”
Much more firmly, Sparrow said, “You have to be quiet.” He tossed Tobi his puzzles, and he caught them easily. “Go play. I need to work now.”
Go play. Maybe he should take the recommendations and kill himself.
Tobi wouldn’t connect what was happening, so Tobi couldn’t ask. Tobi thought Kushina was giving birth in a cave miles away from here for the same reason they took their vacation.
Obito needed to ask if Kushina and Naruto (or Menma, but Tobi was sure it was a boy!) had survived the Nine Tailed Fox escaping. But he couldn’t. So he didn’t know.
His only consolation was that Genma probably didn’t know either. Part of him never wanted Genma to know. If Genma didn’t know, he wouldn’t have to tell Tobi.
Genma had headphones on and was communicating via a tapping code, so Tobi couldn’t understand what was being said. He amplified his hearing with chakra, but the tapping code was in an ANBU cipher that he hadn’t learned. Tobi had to keep a very close eye on Genma instead. If the worst news came, then Tobi would see it in him. A little bit, at least.
Tobi pretended to play with his puzzle. It was difficult finding puzzles that were hard enough for him to keep him quiet. Minato had asked a toymaker in Konoha to make a lot of them, especially for him. The man had been extremely confused by the instructions ‘Can you make the hardest puzzle you can make, that can also be repeatedly solved, for my mentally handicapped fifteen year old student, please he is driving us insane’. He came through, though. Even if this one wasn’t keeping his attention right now.
The bunker shook. Which was extremely concerning, because it was underground. Tobi dropped his puzzle with a yelp, and Genma had to hit his radio a few times.
“Sparrow, I want to go home now!” Tobi yelled. His apartment had definitely just been destroyed.
Genma kept thumping at the radio. “We’ll go home soon. Go back to your puzzle.”
Liar.
“I want Sensei!” Tobi wailed. “Where did Sensei go?”
“The Hokage’s doing work stuff, just like I am. We can’t disturb him right now.” Genma cursed under his breath, fiddling with the dials. “You have to be quiet for my work.”
That one was probably true.
Finally, Tobi thought of an angle. “If the place is for us, where’s Kushina-nee? Is Kushina-nee and the baby gonna be coming soon?”
Genma’s finger fell away from the message button. Dot dot dot. Dash dash dash.
Tobi hated this world. He hated its fates and destinies. He hated gravity, and he hated the tides. He hated the sun rising in the east and setting in the west. He hated the moon, its partner. He hated the forests and the trees; the mountains and the rivers. He hated it all. Every person. Every twist and turn of fate and life that had led them here, to this spot. At Genma crouching in front of Tobi, and Tobi standing ahead of him.
But Tobi hated people most of all.
“Genma.” Genma’s head snapped up, staring at Tobi. “Did the baby make it?”
Genma stared at him for a second, two. Finally, he said, “No reports yet.”
Maybe Tobi just hated this life.
Something far above them shook the ground, and the bunker rattled with it. Genma cursed under his breath, standing up and kicking the receiver aside. With the headphones askew, Tobi could finally hear the other side. Just blazing static. Communications were down.
Tobi felt the pillars of the tower sway and crumple. One tail hit one side, shattering pillars and beams, and Tobi distantly heard the crash. A paw hit another, smashing through a windowsill.
“Everything above the third floor is gone,” Tobi said idly. “The Fox is targeting the tower.”
“And how do you know that?” Genma asked sharply - the first time he’d spoken to Tobi sharply.
Tobi blinked at him. “Wouldn’t you?”
“It’s a beast, it doesn’t know what our buildings mean!”
“Kushina-nee does.” Shake, shake, shake. Everything was collapsing around their ears. “She says that the Fox knows things about her life. The Fox really doesn’t like us, huh?”
“The beasts don’t have -”
A crack split the ceiling. Genma jumped.
The ceiling burst open, and Genma grabbed Tobi. He pushed him to the ground, covering him with his body. What was that going to do? If they died in a cave-in, who would that help? Useless.
He just wanted to die doing his job. If Genma died, he would die as a ninja. Doing what he could. So uselessly. Trying to help people and failing. Trying to do his job and failing. Trying to save his Hokage’s family and failing.
It wasn’t fair. Genma wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him. He’d be out there, fighting, helping his friends and protecting the village. He was one of the best ninja in the village. He’d be making a difference. But he was stuck in here instead - giving his life just for the chance of saving Tobi’s. There were hundreds of good ninja in this village, and Tobi didn’t know how many were good men, but Genma was kind and patient when he didn’t have to be and cared about Kushina when nobody ordered him to and - and -
And Tobi couldn’t let him die!
A shard of cement fell; a boulder of rubble crushed them. A flood of debris and wood slid downwards and buried them. Careless agents of death killed them again and again and again.
It was too late: Tobi and Genma were already gone.
*
Tobi and Genma fell.
The drop was barely five yards above the ground, and Genma had no time to grab Tobi. They tumbled downwards together in the dark before they collided with a hard surface. It wasn’t painful at all. Just startling. Little bits of rubble and stone rained on top of them. A much larger shard of piece fell too, and Tobi had to quickly roll out of the way.
Next to him, Gemma was already dodging a spare falling boulder. It wasn’t as dark as they thought: there was a faint and hazy shade of light coming from above them. Directly above them - Genma and Tobi cast no shadows. As Tobi’s eyes adjusted to the light, and as the shower of debris stopped, he was finally able to look around.
He saw a lot of boxes.
Boxes? Pillars. Boxes?
Pillars. A horizon of pillars, big and tall and stone. Descending into nowhere. Stretching everywhere. It was quiet. Tobi had never been in quiet like this. That cave had been a yawning, mildewing silence, but this silence was loud.
Genma was looking around too. He was squinting slightly, in a characteristic sign of mild surprise. His mask had been knocked off in the chaos, but he wasn’t any more readable. Maybe he could start trying to eat needles again. Maybe it was a ‘well, this may as well happen’ type surprise.
Finally, he said, “Huh. Didn’t know Sharingans could do this.”
So that was why Tobi’s eye was hot. He had felt one spike of a chakra drain, but it was an almost unnoticeable in his giant pool. He knew that he could do - whatever he just did - for hours on hours, but probably not the whole day. He could feel the characteristic circulation of the Mangekyo running through his chakra network - as if it was on, but he wasn’t using it.
Tobi could count on one hand the amount of times he’d activated the Mangekyo. An eye of bad memories. And an eye he claimed he couldn’t use, so it was best to get thoroughly out of the habit. Had he been able to do this the whole time? Whatever he had just done?
“What did I do?” Tobi asked blankly. He was trying to count the boxes and failing miserably. “Where did we fall to…?”
“I think you opened up a portal. To…somewhere.” Genma was craning his head and looking upwards. There was no clear source of the light. No sun or sky to be found. “It’s kinda creepy.”
“It feels safe. Tobi likes things that feel safe.” Tobi kicked a few shards of wood, sending them rolling away. “Some of the cave-in came with us. So I didn’t just send us here. It’s closer to a gate. A gate underground? Or in space!”
“The Flying Thunder God technique utilizes dimensional compression in its teleportation." Genma slowly reached into his pack, withdrawing a senbon. Look at mister oral fixation over here. “I had to learn about it to use the technique. Lots of math, like in sealing. I wonder…”
“I don’t care. We have the same problem.” Tobi crouched down and smacked one of the columns. It made a nice slapping sound, and the stone was cool to the touch. So they weren’t intangible here. “If I open that portal again, we’re right back where we started underneath the Hokage tower. Or what’s left of it. Underground or box dimension…underground or box dimension…”
“We might have to wait until the rubble’s cleaned up.” Genma rubbed his chin. He was growing light bristles. Too busy to shave. “You can open up another one, can’t you? One that spits us out on top of a nice roof somewhere - Tobi, wait!”
Too late, Tobi had already easily hopped from one column to another. A civilian could have made that jump. Experimentally, he crouched and backflipped onto a much higher pillar. Genma was at his tail in a second, vaguely panicked.
“If you go running off, I will never find you again.” Genma grabbed Tobi’s wrist. Tobi squirmed in the grip. “Stay still until we figure this out.”
Tobi glared at the hand on his wrist. He pulled on it, but the grip didn’t budge an inch. Genma didn’t look apologetic at all. “Let go of me! I want to explore!”
“You said the same thing in the marketplace and ended up busting open a cage of parakeets.” That had been funny as hell. He was paying for it now. “Do not move.”
This was his stupid box dimension! Tobi could run recon in his own stupid box dimension! Stupid suffocating bodyguard! Tobi had worked overtime to make sure that nobody trusted him, that nobody thought he was capable of doing anything useful, but sometimes it was really grating. And really inconvenient.
Obito wasn’t a reflexive person. He thought before he did things, and he didn’t react based on feelings. Tobi just did whatever, but Tobi wasn’t really in life-or-death situations that often. He had activated his Mangekyo when he didn’t know he could only because of that life or death situation. Because he had panicked. But Obito was the master of his own body. And he didn’t panic.
If something needed to be done, it was done. That had always been his way.
Tobi concentrated, feeling out his chakra circulation. Genma was scoping out the place with his own chakra, trying to accentuate his eyes and ears to see if there was anything just out of sight. He was trying to make a radar for chakra signatures, but he never received any pings back. There were the lines of Mangekyo…there were the lines currently activated. The flow of chakra was powerful, and didn’t need help. Just find the chakra point here and close it…
Tobi dropped through a portal.
Genma lost his grip and yelled out for him, but it was already too late. Tobi dropped out of the portal onto the pillar where they dropped the first time. Genma ran back towards him at a killer pace, but Tobi was feeling very pleased with himself.
“You can do that here too?” Genma landed next to him, clearly irritated. “Stop opening these. You don’t know where we’re going to end up. What if one of them opens into that void?”
Tobi experimentally poked the air around them. He ran his finger along the seams, feeling the slight cracks in the world. Tobi prodded at that crack, worming it open, and another portal obligingly opened.
Genma immediately grabbed him and pulled him backwards. Good thing, too - dirt immediately began flooding out of the portal like water through a spout. Tobi figured out how to close it as Genma dragged them out of the way. Pretend you’re patching it up, maybe…there you go!
Some of the soil slid over the side of the box. It trailed away, dribbling into the void. Tobi wondered how long it was going to fall.
“Are these randomly happening?” Genma asked. “I’m not feeling good about you accidentally dumping us who-knows-where. Or dumping the Hokage Tower on our heads.”
Jeez. Never any appreciation for hard work. Tobi wriggled out of Genma’s grasp, and Genma reluctantly let him go. Tobi could see him visibly yearn for a child leash. Keep yearning, buster.
Tobi waved his hand, experimenting with drawing the slits and closing them again. It felt like he was lightly running his hand over the fabric of the world. What laid underneath this fabric? What sewed the pieces of fabric together? What did they create?
Then he crouched and leaped towards a higher pillar again, making Genma curse and chase after him. He didn’t make a jump this time - just carefully opened a small portal at eye level, squinting through it.
As he thought. This was entirely collapsed wood. No bedrock.
“It’s analogous,” Tobi said, thoroughly pleased with himself. “They’re two dimensions stacked on top of each other. I’m cutting a hole in here so we can step over there.” Tobi ran his finger over the peephole and closed it. It was even easier this time. “Or maybe we’re moving through the same points in space through two places at once, and I’m moving us between those places…super cool.”
“Looks like that’s the key to our escape.” Genma gave Tobi a sideways look. “Can you sense where this place would dump us out?”
Tobi concentrated. Feed mental sensory chakra through the point, mix it, strain it, release it… “Yup. Let’s jump up a little and go left a lot.”
“You’re really figuring out this dimensional travel stuff as we go, huh…” Genma sighed, but he gave Tobi a small smile too. “I always wondered where you went. Maybe it was just someplace far away…maybe it was here.”
“This is the first time I’ve been here,” Tobi said crossly. “Will you focus? We have stuff to do.”
Genma’s smile fell, but his eyes were still crinkled at the edges. As his frustration and anger and fear was so subtle - that happiness was subtle too. “Can’t say I missed you. I barely knew you. But it’s good to see you again.” Tobi gave him a look of disgust. He genuinely had no idea what Genma was talking about. All of his attention was on the box dimension and how awesome it was. “So come back a little more often, will you? I’d like to know you better.”
Tobi seriously considered the question. Genma was fun. He was fun to annoy and he was pretty cool about it. But he was kind of a drag…but if Genma died then Tobi would probably cry a lot for a really long time. That decided it. Tobi nodded firmly. “Tobi and Genma are gonna go home. And Tobi’s going to play with the baby a lot. And Genma’s gonna keep the baby safe, and he’s gonna play with him too. And if Genma promises to be cool about it, maybe Genma-kun can play with Obito too. Tobi wants that too…”
Genma smiled again - as full and real as Tobi had ever seen. “I promise. It’s a date, then.”
“Ew?”
“Not that kind of date.”
“Tobi doesn’t know about dates…”
“You probably never will,” Genma said. “I guess you’re never going to really fall in love and get married, huh? Does that bother you?” Rin and Kakashi were dead, so Tobi shrugged. “Maybe you’ll do that someday. That would be cool to see. I guess that’s something I want to see…it’s a good thing you don’t care right now, though…”
The silence drowned everything out, and the darkness stretched. Tobi and Genma jumped leftwards for a little while, with Genma letting Tobi lead the way. Tobi had to concentrate a bit for this one. Two sensory inputs, two worlds, not much to see in either one - his would be a lot easier if the real world didn’t feature a lot of dust and dirt right now. He could faintly see that the world had grown lighter. They’d been here longer than expected.
Something was strange. Tobi stopped, and Genma came to a halt next to him. Tobi looked around, searching for that strange thing he had felt. Like ozone.
He’d been feeling these flickers for a while. They were incredibly subtle, when everything else was quiet even the subtle could become pretty loud. Those flickers felt like a light switch. Flipping on and off.
That light was closer. Tobi whirled around, looking everywhere. That light was - where was that light? Where was it?!
Tobi turned around, and there was a boy in a mask in front of him.
He was a little taller than Obito, with bristly short hair. He was wearing a big, oversized high-collared cape that fastened tight around his body. The mask was strange - full-faced, but no eye holes. Must be a jutsu. The pattern was pure white, with a jagged black line through where the eye should be.
Then Genma was in front of Tobi, pushing him backwards. Tobi blinked. The boy didn’t. Maybe.
“You should have changed clothes,” Genma said. The words weren’t light, but they were even. “Minato gave us your description. Did you run and hide here after he kicked your ass?”
“You’re out of the loop.” The boy tilted left a little bit, looking directly at Tobi. “Hi, Tobi.”
Tobi cautiously waved.
“Either this dimension is more of a popping spot than I realized, or you have his eye.” Genma looked the boy up and down, scratching at his chin. “Something about you doesn’t really scream Iwa, though.”
“This is a dimension accessible by all who bear a Sharingan,” the boy said peacefully. “One simply has to unlock its full power. As I have.” The boy tilted his head slightly. He was kind of emotive. “When I used the Sharingan to direct the Nine Tailed Fox into destroying Konoha.”
Genma was breathing purposefully. Deep and slow. Tobi clutched onto Genma’s flak jacket, shaking with fear. He was careful to keep both hands in contact with Genma’s clothing. The second Genma finished getting information from this guy, Tobi was opening a portal and getting them out of here.
Finally, Genma could only say, “Who are you?”
The boy ignored him. He tilted to the side again, addressing the shaking Tobi. “Are you okay?”
Sharply, Genma said, “Don’t ignore me -”
The boy waved a hand, and Genma disappeared.
He just disappeared. Tobi was holding onto him, pressed against him, and he still barely felt it. It opened from inside of Genma, spiraling across his body in the span of a second. Before he was gone.
“Genma!” Tobi yelled. He almost overbalanced - from something to nothing. “What did -”
“He’s fine. Dropped right on top of the rubble of Hokage Tower. I know how much you like him.” The boy stepped forwards, and Tobi froze. “I’m sorry for scaring you. It wasn’t the intention. We needed to talk in private.”
“Yeah, sure.” Tobi held out his wooden arm, feeling the wood writhe underneath the smooth exterior. “Wanna kill me in private too?”
“I wanted to apologize for being a thief.” The boy tapped a blank spot where an eye would be. “After it was forced out of you, it was forced into me as well. I’m afraid that I’m not allowed to return it quite yet. But you’ll get it back once I can.” A little amused, he said, “It may be from my corpse, but I have some ravens who will gladly deliver them back.”
“Why are you apologizing to me?” Tobi asked. “You just wrecked my village. What do you care if you stole my eye or not?”
“I don’t care about the village.” The boy nodded, stepping backwards. “There’s only one thing I can do to help you now. That eye is difficult to use without training. If you give me some of your time, I’ll teach you. Least I can do.”
Tobi opened his mouth to tell the boy - of course not! You destroyed my village, of course not! Kushina’s probably dead, and it’s probably all your fault, and I’m going to kill you! Tobi had to feel angry! He had to want him dead! If Tobi wanted the world dead, then didn’t that include this boy too? This boy, more than anything?
This world was safe. Tobi felt that, deep in his heart. This ethereal boy, of mild countenance and untold cruelty, with an obscured face and body as he lingered in this world between worlds…
This was a world that they shared. That didn’t change a thing.
Tobi did not know where Genma was.
“Okay!” Tobi imperiously held out both of his hands, palm forward. “Asshole Eye Thief gets ten! Minutes! Of Tobi’s valuable time. Then Tobi has to kill you!”
The boy tilted his mask in a smile. “It would be an honor.”
“Tobi thinks you’re really weird,” Tobi said promptly. As limiting as this was - sometimes, the freedom cracked open. “Tobi will hang out with you for ten minutes because you’re weird and nice. And because you feel bad about the eye and want to give Tobi back his things.”
“If Tobi thinks I’m nice, that makes me very happy.”
“But you’re mean to Tobi’s friends, so he doesn’t like you at at all!”
“I think I was pretty nice to your friend.”
“Asshole Eye Thief was telling my friend blatant lies!”
“A lie hits the target before the truth is even aimed,” the boy said cheerfully. “Listen carefully, now. This place is called kamui…”
*
Two days later, Tobi sauntered out of a wall.
Nobody saw him do it. Plenty of people saw him afterwards, when he was found wandering around the village in innocent confusion. Seemingly unharmed. A few ninja had received word that the Yondaime and his entire family had perished in the attack, and ran to inform the old Hokage. New Hokage, now.
Sarutobi had hugged Tobi when he saw him, fast and tight. Tobi thought he smelled like tobacco and old guy. Tobi informed the Hokage of this, making him laugh a little.
The interview with T&I happened on the couch in the Hokage’s new-old office. It went differently than last time, but with the same result. Inoichi couldn’t get anything. A mind too disjointed, with thoughts too incoherent. When he dug deeper, he began diving into the same memories as last time. The seemingly endless reel of torture. There was nothing underneath that - or maybe Inoichi just didn’t have the stomach to go further.
The door to the Hokage’s office sprung open, and a ninja stumbled inside. He was dressed down, in ordinary jounin wear, and his bandana was askew. He was breathing hard, as if he’d ran here at top speed from across the city.
The guards at the door complained, but Genma ignored them. He just stepped in, eyes wide, and saw Tobi sitting on the couch and kicking his feet on the floor.
Tobi grinned when he saw him, bright and white. “Genma! Hi-hi!”
Then Genma was kneeling in front of him and hugging him, tight and delicate, and Tobi found himself hugging Genma back too.
“Thank fuck,” Genma whispered. “Thank fucking…I thought he’d…”
The hug was going on for a while. Tobi delicately patted Genma on the back.
“Uh, Genma? So when’s Sensei and Kushina-nee picking me up?”
The room was silent, and it all came crashing down.
*
“I know you. I can tell.” The boy inspected Tobi’s wooden hand carefully. His coat had pushed back over his shoulder, but there were only standard black fatigue pants, black long-sleeved netting shirt, and a black short-sleeved shirt over it. His gloves were thin and soft. “Once you leave, you won’t be doing well. It’s advantageous. They won’t be able to interrogate you and there’s no way for you to act suspicious. It’s quite genius, really.”
They were sitting across from each other, cross-legged. Knees bumping as the boy inspected his hand. Tobi felt slow and sluggish.
“You’re pure and sweet. I’m drawn to it. Moth to flame, maybe. Or a man on fire to water.” The boy gently pressed Tobi’s hand between his palms. “This strategic and canny purity. That’s what makes you Obito. Not a child or a do - dog.” The boy had never tripped over his words before, and it took a second before he spoke again. “I like your strategies and jokes. Your vacation was fun. I like to see you having fun. But I have to say…” The boy clasped Tobi’s hand in his own. “That purity deep inside of you…please continue to show it to me. It’s the closest approximation to peace in this world.”
Tobi didn’t remember what he said after that, or if he said anything at all. He didn’t remember much about those two days. That was very easy for T&I to believe, and finding the information in his mind was impossible. News that the man who released the nine tailed fox used a Sharingan began to spread. Absolutely classified ninja secrets didn’t often leave closed doors, and the Hokage never discovered who had let that rumor spread.
They asked him to use his Sharingan again - to take them to that place. Tobi could not, no matter how many times they asked or tried to coach him through it. Others wanted to yell or shame him into it. Ibiki found that stupid. That had been the reason for their first fuck-up. They hadn’t gotten any information about the month and a half he spent in custody of an unknown group receiving major experimental surgeries. Surgeries that would have turned a potential top ninja in the village into an unbeatable super-soldier. They didn’t get a single word, because every time the strongest Uchiha got too stressed he grew more and more useless.
Nohara’s death made him so hysterical that he didn’t give a single ounce of coherent testimony. They started working around a freak-out trigger, but they took shortcuts instead. Kushina had been the only reason they got anything at all. She gave him lots of hugs, played with him until he forgot why he was in an interrogation cell in the first place, and signalled them when he was ready. Maternal figures. They were short on pseudo-mothers right now.
Genma confirmed that Tobi was useless when stressed. He said something else, too - that they could reverse it. If the mental five year old felt safe and protected, they could draw Obito out. If he was with somebody he trusted. The only people who had ever managed something like that were Nohara, Lord Minato, and Kushina Uzumaki.
“Then we’re fucked,” Ibiki said shortly. “We’re never going to see that godlike power again. His life’s just been destroyed. No wonder he’s stupider than usual.” Ibiki clicked his tongue. “The only way he could activate it was when he thought you two were going to die. Tried to put some genjutsus on him to replicate that feeling, but apparently it’s impossible to fool even an unusable super-Sharingan.”
Genma just looked at him for a second. Indecipherable, as always. You couldn’t even see the exhaustion. “You tried to genjutsu a cognitive five year old into thinking him and his only caretaker were going to die?”
“Yup. Too bad it didn’t work.”
And if Genma promises to be cool about it, maybe Genma-kun can play with Obito too. Tobi wants that too…
Obito’s last words. An unexpected glimpse of hope in somebody they believed was lost forever.
Maybe it didn’t matter. That world was lost from the start. He would never play with that baby. Minato and Kushina were never going to hold him again. There was no world where Genma would ever see Obito again. That was the function of this cruel and horrible world, filled with horrible humans and cruel monsters..
Even still. Even so. In the midst of the inevitable, against an enemy that even the Fourth Hokage couldn’t defeat. Genma had made a promise.
He had promised Obito that they were going to go home, and that nobody was going to hurt him. Nobody was going to ineffectually try and torture his power out of him. Obito had wanted Genma.
Didn’t matter. Genma had already asked. Tobi didn’t remember making that promise. Nobody was disappointed, nobody was betrayed, and nobody wanted to play.
“I’m taking him home.” Nobody had even invited Genma to the quick meeting playing hot potato with the kid, but Genma had shown up anyway. “The Uchiha refused to place him with anybody. Said he could take care of himself. Which means that none of them came to see him, ‘cause they sure wouldn’t say that if they saw him right now.” Ibiki raised a stiff eyebrow. Where was home, then? “Lord Hokage actually said he could stay in his personal apartment until he’s back to normal. I’ll be looking after him. We’re wrapping this T&I stuff up soon, and you’ll release him to me once you’re done.”
“That’s generous of Lord Hokage.”
“After Fugaku left, he offered immediately. Said that Biwako would love having a cheerful little boy around again. Then I saw him remember she's gone, you know? Sucks. It doesn’t matter much. He’ll be too busy to go home for weeks.”
“So he ordered you to play nanny for who knows how long?”
“Why would he have to? My mission’s not done. ” Genma looked away. In a strange and stupid way, he tried to look as far as he can. Into that far away place. “Minato-sama told me to look after him ‘til he’s safe again. Had me promise. My mission ain’t done.”
That was all that Genma could say.
And all he could say to Tobi was that I’m sorry, because Sensei isn’t picking you up. I’m sorry, Kushina can’t come. I’m sorry, please don’t worry about the baby.
He said it again and again and again, and each time Tobi forgot, and in the end Genma stopped feeling as if he was saying anything at all.
I would love the Yuna The Truck lore if you are willing to provide it, obsessed with the snapshot glimpses we get of this woman 👀
I am in love with Yuna “The Truck” Hollander.
Yuna’s lore as “The Truck” was in part made to directly contrast Shane’s “Mr. Canada” image. Yuna appears to be the primary driving force behind Shane’s squeaky clean image. He has a lot of kids looking up to him, so behave and wear your Reeboks. You do not get to be like everyone else. You have to be better and do better because no one will give you the benefit of the doubt.
And I thought that would be so much more interesting if Yuna was coming from a place of experience. She knows that Shane cannot get away with half of what his white coworkers could because she sure as hell didn’t.
Yuna Hollander had a historical goddamn talent in a sport that had no space for her.
Canon suggests she has a Hockey IQ that is just as high as Shane’s, if not higher. She’s watching games and able to identify players’ injuries from her couch in fucking Ottawa and Shane and David are like “yes mom with her hockey witchiness.” Shane your hockey instincts have made international news and your mother’s the one with arcane hockey powers?
Yuna Hollander had the kind of talent for hockey that belonged in the goddamn history books. Shane got his historical talent from her. David was good, great even, but he wasn’t generational. Yuna was.
No one cared.
There was no place for her in this sport.
The PWHL has existed for three years. The CWHL didn’t exist until 2007 and it was disbanded in 2019. It’s maximum salary for individual players?
$10,000. The minimum was $2,000. You could not play women’s hockey professionally until three years ago,. The only “professional league” before then could only pay its players pittances. Everyone had to have another job, and meanwhile male hockey players have gotten to dedicate their full lives to the sport for over a hundred years.
Yuna Hollander grows up before even the CWHL. She is a historical goddamn talent in a sport that has no professional league for her. The farthest she could hope to go was college hockey.
She hoped farther. She had the same hunger for hockey that Shane did. If there wasn’t a league then she would fucking build it herself. She was better than everyone and wanted it more than everyone and if there wasn’t a place for her in this world she would carve it out, and that’s a love story, I think. She loved hockey enough to make the world into a place where she could still play it.
She went to a school that had a women’s ice hockey program and her degree path was meant to give her the skills she needed to build a fucking league of her own. She would learn the business and brand savvy she needed to make a carve out her own fucking place in the universe.
So there Yuna Hollander was. Not yet a Hollander. Ready to tear it up on the ice.
She is a slight-figured Asian woman who is the child of immigrants trying to make it in a very violent and physical sport.
The uwufication of Asian people is honestly fucking weird. Men are regularly feminized. Women are babified. It just. It gets weird.
Yuna wasn’t taken seriously. She is supposed to be waifu. Are you lost little girl. Should you maybe pick a different, safer sport??
Yuna decided to give them something they had to take seriously. The Truck will run you the fuck down.
She played hard. She played with unbelievable goddamn skill. She was fast and harsh and so agonizingly talented. And no one ever got away with shit when they were playing The Truck. You fucked with her and you walked away feeling like you were in a fucking car accident.
She got a lot of penalties. More than anyone, even. She was never afraid to fight.
Not all of her penalty minutes were earned.
Time to talk again about one of my favorite books on hockey, Game Misconduct, about all the ways this sport is fucked up.
One of the phenomenons the book discusses is the fact that minorities get treated as irrational and violent for things white players often get away with. One anecdote attested to an all white team playing very roughly with a team compromised of mostly pocs. The pocs got fed up and started giving it back to them. And the person being interviewed about it said that all of the parents of the white players who kept hand-waving away their children’s behavior suddenly became staunch advocates for pacifism. Look At How Violent Your Little Beasts Are. Many poc players in the book describe being treated as dangerous and unhinged for the same behavior their white counterparts regularly get away with on the ice.
Not all of Yuna’s penalty minutes were earned. She was treated like a violent and unhinged player and had the reputation of it. But she wasn’t. She was, above all, skilled. She just didn’t take shit the way people expected her to, and so she was punished for it.
And the people who penalized her often got away with it. She was The Truck. If she could dish it, she needed to take it. She got a lot of penalties called against her, but not so many in her favor.
Anyway David Hollander saw The Truck mowing bitches down left and right one day and he said to himself.
Wow.
What a woman.
I’m gonna marry her one day, if that’s alright with her.
And everyone who knew him said, No Dave.
That’s too much woman for you.
But David Hollander is not a fucking coward.
David was a goalie for the men’s team at McGill. Yuna was a defensewoman for the stingers, which is a real women’s ice hockey team. I did not change the name the way I usually do. Because the stingers are the women’s ice hockey team for Concordia University.
McGill and Concordia are rival schools.
Their romance defied a rivalry.
Honestly their love story shocked everyone around them except for themselves. Dave and Yuna always made perfect sense to Dave and Yuna.
David Hollander had no interest in taming The Truck. He had no interest in imposing his own expectations on The Truck. He liked her exactly how she was, thanks. Would she maybe like to take a walk in the moonlight with him and also spend the rest of their lives together?
Yuna liked Dave for a lot of reasons, but she really liked how he never got caught up in preconceived expectations. He didn’t read her as violent and irrational. He didn’t read her as an uwu princess. He was the kind of guy who would give her the penalties she earned, which is all she’s ever wanted. She wanted fairness. David was always fair. She liked that about him. She liked a lot of things about him, but especially that.
Yuna’s ending is fundamentally tragic. She is taken down with an unbelievably dirty hit that destroys her knee. The injury is career ending. She will never play professionally. It does not matter if she builds her own space, because she no longer has a place in it.
The person who does it to her gets away with it.
The ref that was on that day fucking hated her. He had a history of calling penalties on her that she didn’t commit and letting people get away with penalties against her. He didn’t like that she was Asian. He didn’t like that she refused to take shit. He didn’t like that she was the best player he had ever goddamn seen.
The person who did this to her gets a double minor.
Four fucking minutes in the penalty box for destroying her entire goddamn world. It nearly fucking kills her.
But it doesn’t. She lives. Dave helps her do that. She doesn’t start the league. She is too angry. All she can think about is the girl who did this to her who still gets to play, and all of her fellow players who waffled about it after.
She’s The Truck, after all. She knows that sometimes you get run over. Can she really be upset?
But Yuna didn’t give out hits like this. She was fair. She was brutal but she was fair. She would have never fucking done this to someone else and how fucking dare everyone pretend she would have.
She is so unbearably angry.
She is angry every single day of her life.
She marries Dave. She finds new things to love. They are not nearly as good as hockey. It takes her years to even watch a game again and she still is able to understand the molecules of the sport better than any player on the ice.
She is still angry.
She and Dave play hockey at the lake, just the two of them. It feels like an astronaut coming back to earth. It feels like she never quite reaches the ground. She cannot skate the way she used to. She will never be who she once was. She can play again. But at the same time it is gone forever and she cannot get it back.
She is so goddamn empty sometimes.
She can’t have a baby. She has one anyway. She won’t have another, the doctors promise. She’s got one shot at this motherhood thing. Don’t fuck this one up. There are no redos.
Try not to make him hate you.
Little Shane Hollander sits in her lap as she watches hockey. He can barely hold up his own head, but his eyes still track the puck.
Yuna knows he has the same special something in him that she had in her before she ever puts skates on his feet. She knows hockey will be to him what it was to her.
There’s just something in him that needs it like lungs need air.
Yuna puts so much pressure on Shane because she is trying to save him from the biggest agony of her life. She knows what it means to be a minority in a space with no room for you. She knows what it means to have to fight everyone’s expectations. She builds his image like a goddamn suit of armor because she is trying to make him a protection they cannot destroy. No one is ending Shane Hollander’s career too soon, but if they do? They will fucking pay for it. No one will say he had it coming. She will not give them the fucking room for it.
So he needs to be Mr. Canada. He needs to be the Goodest boy to ever roam the ice. He needs everyone to love him and respect him and know he is beyond reproach. People that look like them do not have the luxury of otherwise.
Trust her, because Yuna knows.
Yuna’s hyper-management of Shane and his image is fundamentally damaging to their relationship but at the same time, it is meant to be a love letter.
I will not let them do to you what they did to me. I will not let them do to you what they did to me. I will not let them do to you what they did to me.
And Shane knows that. He sees so much of himself in his mother that it kills him. He sees the ache and the absence and the emptiness left since she lost hockey. He knows why she’s so hard on him because he knows she’s trying to protect him from her own existential loss.
It’s why he’s so afraid to come out to her.
It’s why he apologizes to her. It’s why he tells her he tried.
He tried so fucking hard to be something that got to still play hockey. He tried so fucking hard to be anything other than this. Because this is not something that has ever safely existed in the nhl. This does not get to keep playing.
More than 100 goddamn years, and not a single gay player until Scott Hunter.
He feels like he betrayed everything she tried to give him. She poured so much into protecting him and he had to go and be the one thing she could never protect. No one ever could. He cannot imagine a world where this comes out and he still gets to play.
But Yuna Hollander is the kind of woman who will rebuild the world to make space for herself. And she is still writing her love letter.
She will not let them do to her sons what they did to her. If this league doesn’t have space for two queer hockey players in love, then she will turn it into fucking scrap and build a new one.
I saw a post with Krypto the dog from the new 2025 "Superman" movie, which reminded me... I really liked Krypto, and I was also judging Clark HARSHLY through like 75% of the movie for having such a poorly trained dog until the reveal that he was honestly just dog-sitting for Kara. I was internally like, "Okay, he must have gotten Krypto pretty recently in this universe, because my boy Clark Kent ought to be a more responsible super-dog owner than this. Krypto could easily kill a lot of people and animals. Ma and Pa raised you BETTER than this, Clark-! Oh, it's Kara's adorable nightmare dog. Okay. Yeah."
doing all the post COVID exposure stuff (saline sinus rinse, azelastine nasal spray) just to be careful bc we didn't mask today, and wondering why it's so seldom talked about to people who won't mask for whatever silly reason like "I don't like them on my face" or "they make me claustrophobic" or "no one can hear me talk" or whatever like... I've never heard anyone who refuses to mask say "and because I don't do that, I do all this other stuff to ensure I am lowering my chances of spreading respiratory disease." its always "I can't mask and I don't do anything else either" and no one ever goes "well, have you considered all of these other things you can do post exposure?" because those things aren't as effective as masks, I guess, but THEYRE WAY WAY BETTER THAN NOTHING if you do then right after you go somewhere unmasked (you can do the spray before, too, and it will help even more. even if you contract COVID the spray reduces viral load and symptoms.) it's weirdly absent from discussion of this kind of thing
I genuinely didn't know there was anything other than masks and vaccinations to help prevent covid transmission. OP says in the replies that its too exhausted tonight to get into it so I started looking on my own and the top ten results are all Isolate, mask, get tested, vaccinate.
Searching for "azelastine nasal spray covid" did get me this study though. I wonder if my pcp would prescribe me some for after I spend time around people unmasked, since I've got long covid already.
here's a funny conversation topic i had a with a friend: if you're over the age of 25, when's the last time you really *ran* in a panic (like you were late, chasing after something, etc. things like a marathon don't count!) and what was it for?
Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.
But... Stochastic Parrots.
Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.
Her name is Timnit Gebru.
She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.
The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.
The paper had not even been published yet.
Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.
The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.
This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.
The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.
The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.
Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.
Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.
The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.
In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.
The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.
In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.
The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.
Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.
This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.
The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.
The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.
Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.
She was making that argument from inside Google.
Then Google proved her right by removing her.
The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.
Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.
Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.
The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.
Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.
The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.
The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.
And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so.
"Calendar plants like Serviceberry are important for synchronizing the seasonal rounds of traditional Indigenous People, who move in an annual cycle through their homelands to where the foods are ready. Instead of changing the land to suit their convenience, they changed themselves. Eating with the seasons is a way of honoring abundance, by going to meet it when and where it arrives. A world of produce warehouses and grocery stores enables the practice of having what you want when you want it. We force the food to come to us, at considerable financial and ecological costs, rather than following the practice of taking what has been given to us, each in its own time."
— The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World (2024) by Robin Wall Kimmerer.
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