Part of why Ilya keeps his Russian agent for so long is how he makes zero attempt to reign Ilya in. Which is how Ilya’s social media is so fully him.
At some point he adds ethical slut to his Twitter bio which occasionally causes a stir but mostly gets a reaction of truth in advertising. What causes a much bigger stir is when he updates it to taken slut post all stars weekend.
I would read the fuck out of Ilya grading thirst traps online as a bit iajs. Pre the fan vid fiasco. He just rolls up and retweets pics with cutting commentary and everyone lives in fear/hope of his notice.
When Shane changes Ilya’s name in his phone from Lily, he puts ILYa for his first name which weirds Ilya out a bit because it’s so unlike Shane to have something inconsistently formatted. A bit but not enough that he lingers on it and it’s not even that often he sees his info on Shane’s phone.
Of course it’s for I love you because they’re friends so he can’t be in Shane’s phone as Lily anymore and Shane wants to put a million hearts after his name, but he can’t do that either, so it’s his quiet little selfishness that would look like a mistake to anyone else but he knows what it means. And even after they’re outed, after Ilya adds hearts and eggplants and god knows what else to his name, he keeps it. They don’t have to be a secret anymore but that doesn’t mean he can’t have things just for him.
When the centaurs figure it out, maybe Luca? Shane blushes so red and Ilya stuffs all the cash he’s carrying in the PDA jar because there’s no way he’s not kissing the fuck out of his husband about this.
More of the crow heated rivalry fic. Part 1: https://www.tumblr.com/tommyandthejons/820350357526986752/i-wrote-a-thing-oh-yeah-im-obsessed-with-heated
The next time the bird pecks at the window Shane opens it right away. There’s no gift this time, but it caws “right wing, right wing,” cryptically and before Shane can try to see if there’s anything wrong with his wing, he takes a beak full of Shane’s brown rice before flying away.
The cryptic hint clicks when Shane’s watching game tape that night, they’re playing the admirals in a few days, and there’s a weakness with their first line right wing. He thinks he would have caught it eventually but he’s grateful for the assist none-the-less, even more so when he’s able to take advantage not once but twice to score the winning goal.
After that, the bird is a regular guest in Shane’s apartment. He doesn’t leave the window open but he does research bird appropriate food and buy a bird feeder even if the first time he offers the bird seeds it caws, “McD, McD,” at him. Shane wouldn’t put that shit in his own body let alone feed it to a tiny, well he knows better to say defenseless, that beak is sharp, bird.
He researches crows too, finds out that they do sometimes pick up trinkets, though normally they give them to humans who have befriended them, and that they’re exceptional mimics, except that doesn’t account for the specificity of this crow, the way everything he says ties back to hockey. Shane tries to tell himself it’s like horoscopes and tarot cards, if he was something other than a hockey player— Shane can’t even think what else he’d be— but whatever he was, he’d relate the caws back to something else.
He holds on to that thought until the crow chirps, “weak backhand,” after a particularly embarrassing game against Toronto. Embarrassing because they’re not even GOOD and yet somehow nothing Shane did got through. He’d blame it on their regular goalie being out on LTI and Hayes being in the net, except the crow isn’t wrong that maybe if his backhand had been a little stronger that goal would have made it past Hayes.
That’s when Shane starts mentally calling the bird Crow-zanov because the chirp reminds him so much of Ilya even as his memories of the center feel increasingly distant. He’d tried asking the crow what his name was, but he had just shook his head and cawed, “can’t, can’t,” before flying away. So Crow-zanov it is, even if only in Shane’s head.
I wrote a thing! Oh yeah I’m obsessed with heated rivalry now. Not sure if I’ll ever finish this so thought I’d put it out in the world in case anyone cares about a little bit of magical realism.
When Shane is drafted first it doesn’t feel anything like he expects it to. It means he’s going to Boston instead of Montreal which feels wrong somehow and there’s a weird part of him that thinks it should be the Bears. No, the Raiders. No, the Bears. But certainly not the Boston Blackbirds.
Beyond everything else it feels wrong because even if he goes first, Rozanov isn’t there. It doesn’t feel like a victory without him there in the second spot. That’s odd too— every conversation Shane has about where Ilya is ends with people kind of blanking him, changing the subject, acting as though he’d never spoke, once memorably just walking away.
Shane tracks it, files it, and lets it go— no attempt to take action seems to do anything. So instead he moves to Boston, takes the team’s advice and gets an apartment where the Boston rookies always get apartments, inheriting his from someone who was leaving for another team and so didn’t warn Shane about the leaking kitchen faucet or the light switch that as far as Shane could tell did absolutely nothing. He gets an apartment and trains and starts to build a life in Boston, finds three Asian groceries and between them is able to ensure he has all of the things he needs. He goes to the rink then home then to the rink again, calling his parents in between lessons often than they’d like, but more often than he thinks most would and settles into a routine and learns to ignore the wrongness.
It works until before the first game which is when the knocking on his window starts. He hadn’t been warned about that either. Five distinct knocks but Shane is on the top floor, the window in question barely has a ledge and when he looks out, there’s nothing there. The knocking continues into the small hours of the night until Shane breaks and opens the window to look out as irrational as it is.
He expects to see nothing, to realize that he just needs to get his soundproof headphones or some earplugs or something. He does not expect a blackbird to swoop through the open window, perching in front of him, a golden crucifix in its mouth.
He’s not sure why he holds out his hand but when he does, the bird drops the necklace into his hand.
“Wear it,” the bird says and Shane’s at the point where he’s wondering if this is some sort of odd hazing, maybe the guys laced his water with something, except it would be a crazy thing to do before they play Montreal.
“What?” Shane asks almost reflexively and the bird caws in annoyance. “You wear. Protect.” And stares at Shane until he puts it on. Then disappears into the night and if it weren’t for the heavy weight of the charm and chain it would be as if he’d never been there.
The guys chirp him about it when he’s wearing it as he suits up, but it’s not… they’re going to razz him about something no matter what and it’s less terrible than when it’s his mom or his penis size even if it is a bit girly. And during the game he feels a clarity of focus, like the other players can’t stay on him. He didn’t expect to play any significant amount of time in his first game, but when he skates away with a goal and an assist, he’s uncertain whether to credit his own skill or the necklace.
*hands* as always full credit for inspiration to @captivamoon with whom I’ve been discussing Ilya as a crow among other topics.
dni unless you have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, all the modern languages, all while possessing a certain something in your air and manner of walking, the tone of your voice, your address and expressions-
So imagine you go to a brothel and when you get there it’s full of beautiful women but then also there’s this dog. And when you ask “hey what’s with the dog” they’re like oh the dog, we love the dog, everybody loves the dog, the dog collects rocks from the yard. And you’re like “okay” but later you find the dog gathering piles of rocks and cementing them into a beautiful river-stone wall to protect the building. And you’re like “I didn’t even know dogs could do that”. And they’re like “that’s nothing, check this out” and then the dog starts doing multiplication with the rocks. You’re like “what the fuck” and they go “nahh she’s just getting started”. And they start giving the dog complex mathematical formulas that the dog answers by laying out the rocks. And you go “holy shit that’s the smartest dog I’ve ever seen”. And they go “it’s the smartest dog in the world” and you’re like “wow that’s amazing”. And then you look outside and the dog is eating the rocks. And you’re like “can the dog eat rocks?”. And they’re like “no”
One day you find out the dog went missing. “We don’t know where the dog went but we miss the dog”, the beautiful women tell you. A year later the dog comes back. The dog is accompanied by the Duke of wales. “My gardener stole this dog but now I would like to buy it”, he says. “The dog has built me a beautiful castle and solved the viscount’s mysterious murder.” You aren’t sure how the dog did that by stacking rocks but you’re still incredibly impressed. The beautiful women are so happy to see the dog again. “Did you know that the dog can ride a bike?” The Duke asks. You look at the dog. The dog is obviously concealing a mouth full of gravel
genuinely wild to me when I go to someone's house and we watch TV or listen to music or something and there are ads. I haven't seen an ad in my home since 2005. what do you mean you haven't set up multiple layers of digital infrastructure to banish corporate messaging to oblivion before it manifests? listen, this is important. this is the 21st century version of carving sigils on the wall to deny entry to demons or wearing bells to ward off the Unseelie. come on give me your router admin password and I'll show you how to cast a protective spell of Get Thee Tae Fuck, Capital
Okay, here we go! I'm gonna try and put this in order from least to most technical knowledge required. I'm not responsible if you accidentally create SkyNet etc.
Level 1: browser extensions
This one is basically impossible to get wrong, or at least to get wrong badly enough that it causes any problems.
Get Firefox, or a Firefox fork like Waterfox. If you use a fork, make sure it's one that will let you use add-ons. On a PC, pretty much any Firefox fork will take add-ons, but on mobile devices, many don't. Iceraven is one that does.
Get the add-ons uBlock Origin, YouTube Sponsorblock (if you use YouTube), and FBCleaner (if you use Facebook).
uBlock Origin comes with a built-in list of filters to block ads and trackers, but you can add your own filters to block any specific element of a website you don't like. You know those goddamn floating frames on fandom.com sites that block half the screen? Now you can zap 'em.
Sponsorblock uses crowdsourced timestamps to automatically skip sponsor spots and self-promotion in YouTube videos. Never listen to anyone say "hit like and subscribe" or "Raid Shadow Legends" again.
FBCleaner hides all content from your feed except posts from people, groups, and pages you've actually chosen to follow.
Level 2: leaving enshittified services
The software that's become standard over the years in a lot of fields is steadily selling more of your data, showing you more ads, and pushing you to buy more expensive subscriptions. Time to tell them to get fucked.
Dump Adobe apps for Affinity or Krita. Drop Microsoft for LibreOffice. Change your default search engine from Google to DuckDuckGo or Qwant. Use OpenStreetMaps instead of Google or Apple Maps.
Level 3: network-level DNS fuckery
DNS, or Domain Name Service, is the thing that tells your computer where www.website.com is actually located. By hacking your network's DNS you can force it to tell your devices that ad-hosting domains don't exist at all. Some of the steps on this one can get pretty technical, but because you're doing all the difficult stuff on a dedicated device, you can't really fuck up anything that seriously.
Get yourself a Raspberry Pi (a cheap older one like a model 3B will work just fine for this purpose), and follow a guide like this one to get it set up running AdGuard Home. AdGuard, like uBlock, has built-in filter lists, but you can also add your own if there are specific domains you want to block.
Once it's up and running, you'll need to change the DNS settings on your router to point to your AdGuard service. This is different for every router but will always start with logging into the admin panel with a password printed on a little sticker somewhere on the router.
With that done, every time a device on your home network looks for ads.website.com, it'll get back a message that says "sorry, can't find it", so it won't be able to load any ads.
Level 4: Android-specific DNS fuckery
Because AdGuard runs on your home network, it can't block ads on your phone when you're away from home - and what's worse, your phone will sometimes remember the addresses it got when you were out and about, and ads will get past your AdGuard wall even when you're home.
To avoid this, get AdAway for DNS-based ad-blocking directly on your phone. The easy, but less seamless, way of using AdAway is the "local VPN mode", which doesn't require you to do any mucking about with your phone's operating system.
Level 5: automated media piracy
The best way to stop seeing ads on all your streaming services is to stop using streaming services. There are loads of ways to do this, but the best ones involve setting up what's called an "arr stack" (Google that for setup guides) along with nzbget and a usenet account. Most of the time you'll want to set this stuff up on a dedicated device - an old laptop gathering dust in the closet is a great option, or you can grab something used from a charity shop or a local electronics recycler.
The great thing about usenet is that unlike with torrents, you don't have to do any sharing from your computer, so you're in a lot less legal jeopardy - legally speaking, distributing pirated content is waaayyy more serious than accessing it. I pay about £3 a month for a secure, high-bandwidth usenet service.
Once you start getting your own collection of media on your own computer, use the open-source media library manager Jellyfin to browse and play things from basically any device.
Oh, and don't be a dick. Pirate all you want from big corporations, but please pay independent small-time creators for their work.
Level 6: fucking with Android
Android phones are a lot more locked-down than they used to be, but depending on the device you own you can still do a lot of messing around under the hood. Note that if you get something wrong while doing this, there is always the possibility that it will turn your device into a paperweight.
Before you buy a device, check where it sits on the Bootloader Unlock Wall of Shame. Once you've bought it, check the xda-developer forums for guides on how to unlock it and "root" it (gain admin access) with Magisk.
Once Magisk is installed, you can add modules to do all sorts of cool stuff, including using AdAway in "root mode" which makes it basically invisible.
You can also install YouTube ReVanced, which will do all the ad- and sponsor blocking stuff we took care of in your Windows browser a few paragraphs ago. Be careful: there are a lot of fake sites out there pretending they're associated with the ReVanced project which might be injecting malware into their downloads. This Reddit post has the official instructions and links.
Also, try out the modded version of Facebook from APKmoddone, which will block most of the same shit as the FBcleaner add-on from earlier. There's always a possibility that modified apps like this are doing something dodgy, but I've never had any issues with this one personally.
Level 7: fucking with Windows
This one is scary because it can seriously fuck up your shit if something goes wrong, but some really cool people have actually made it very simple to strip all the bloat, ads, and spyware out of Windows. The tool I use is ReviOS. Start reading at https://www.revi.cc/docs. Basically, you'll need to download a tool called AME Wizard and the ReviOS "playbook" that tells AME what to do. Read the documentation before you do any of this.
Level 8: switching to Linux
I'm not going to pretend this is an option for everyone. Half the software I use on a weekly basis isn't available on Linux. But if you can switch? Do it. These days, Ubuntu - one of the most popular flavours of Linux - is built with people switching from Windows in mind, and a lot of things will be pretty intuitive. It also has great documentation and a huge community you can go to for help if you're confused about stuff.
And that, friends, is a comprehensive approach to banishing the demons of capitalism from your home!
As gen-AI becomes more normalized (Chappell Roan encouraging it, grifters on the rise, young artists using it), I wanna express how I will never turn to it because it fundamentally bores me to my core. There is no reason for me to want to use gen-AI because I will never want to give up my autonomy in creating art. I never want to become reliant on an inhuman object for expression, least of all if that object is created and controlled by tech companies. I draw not because I want a drawing but because I love the process of drawing. So even in a future where everyone’s accepted it, I’m never gonna sway on this.
A Yorkshire farmer's journal from 1810 reveals surprisingly modern views on being gay.
By Sean Coughlan
BBC News
A diary written by a Yorkshire farmer more than 200 years ago is being hailed as providing remarkable evidence of tolerance towards homosexuality in Britain much earlier than previously imagined.
Historians from Oxford University have been taken aback to discover that Matthew Tomlinson's diary from 1810 contains such open-minded views about same-sex attraction being a "natural" human tendency.
The diary challenges preconceptions about what "ordinary people" thought about homosexuality - showing there was a debate about whether someone really should be discriminated against for their sexuality.
"In this exciting new discovery, we see a Yorkshire farmer arguing that homosexuality is innate and something that shouldn't be punished by death," says Oxford researcher Eamonn O'Keeffe.
The diaries were handwritten by Tomlinson in the farmhouse where he lived and worked
The historian had been examining Tomlinson's handwritten diaries, which have been stored in Wakefield Library since the 1950s.
The thousands of pages of the private journals have never been transcribed and previously used by researchers interested in Tomlinson's eye-witness accounts of elections in Yorkshire and the Luddites smashing up machinery.
But O'Keeffe came across what seemed, for the era of George III, to be a rather startling set of arguments about same-sex relationships.
Tomlinson had been prompted by what had been a big sex scandal of the day - in which a well-respected naval surgeon had been found to be engaging in homosexual acts.
Historian Eamonn O'Keeffe says the diaries provide a rare insight into the views of "ordinary people" in the early 1800s
A court martial had ordered him to be hanged - but Tomlinson seemed unconvinced by the decision, questioning whether what the papers called an "unnatural act" was really that unnatural.
Tomlinson argued, from a religious perspective, that punishing someone for how they were created was equivalent to saying that there was something wrong with the Creator.
"It must seem strange indeed that God Almighty should make a being with such a nature, or such a defect in nature; and at the same time make a decree that if that being whom he had formed, should at any time follow the dictates of that Nature, with which he was formed, he should be punished with death," he wrote on January 14 1810.
If there was an "inclination and propensity" for someone to be homosexual from an early age, he wrote, "it must then be considered as natural, otherwise as a defect in nature - and if natural, or a defect in nature; it seems cruel to punish that defect with death".
The diarist makes reference to being informed by others that homosexuality is apparent from an early age - suggesting that Tomlinson and his social circle had been talking about this case and discussing something that was not unknown to them.
Around this time, and also in West Yorkshire, a local landowner, Anne Lister, was writing a coded diary about her lesbian relationships - with her story told in the television series, Gentleman Jack.
But knowing what "ordinary people" really thought about such behaviour is always difficult - not least because the loudest surviving voices are usually the wealthy and powerful.
What has excited academics is the chance to eavesdrop on an everyday farmer thinking aloud in his diary.
Tomlinson was appalled by the levels of corruption during elections
"What's striking is that he's an ordinary guy, he's not a member of the bohemian circles or an intellectual," says O'Keeffe, a doctoral student in Oxford's history faculty.
An acceptance of homosexuality might have been expressed privately in aristocratic or philosophically radical circles - but this was being discussed by a rural worker.
"It shows opinions of people in the past were not as monolithic as we might think," says O'Keeffe, who is originally from Canada.
"Even though this was a time of persecution and intolerance towards same-sex relationships, here's an ordinary person who is swimming against the current and sees what he reads in the paper and questions those assumptions."
Claire Pickering, library manager in Wakefield, says she imagines the single-minded Tomlinson speaking the words with a Yorkshire accent.
There are three volumes of Tomlinson's diaries at Wakefield Library
He was a man with a "hungry mind", she says, someone who listened to a lot of people's opinions before forming his own conclusions.
The diary, presumably compiled after a hard day's work, was his way of being a writer and commentator when otherwise "that wasn't his station in life", she says.
O'Keeffe says it shows ideas were "percolating through British society much earlier and more widely than we'd expect" - with the diary working through the debates that Tomlinson might have been having with his neighbours.
But these were still far from modern liberal views - and O'Keeffe says they can be extremely "jarring" arguments.
If someone was homosexual by choice, rather than by nature, Tomlinson was ready to consider that they should still be punished - proposing castration as a more moderate option than the death penalty.
Tomlinson's former home was still there in the 1930s (bottom left), but has since disappeared beneath housing and a golf course
O'Keeffe says discovering evidence of these kinds of debate has both "enriched and complicated" what we know about public opinion in this pre-Victorian era.
The diary is raising international interest.
Prof Fara Dabhoiwala, from Princeton University in the US, an expert in the history of attitudes towards sexuality, describes it as "vivid proof" that "historical attitudes to same-sex behaviour could be more sympathetic than is usually presumed".
Instead of seeing homosexuality as a "horrible perversion", Prof Dabholwala says the record showed a farmer in 1810 could see it as a "natural, divinely ordained human quality".
Rictor Norton, an expert in gay history, said there had been earlier arguments defending homosexuality as natural - but these were more likely to be from philosophers than farmers.
"It is extraordinary to find an ordinary, casual observer in 1810 seriously considering the possibility that sexuality is innate and making arguments for decriminalisation," says Dr Norton.
Who was the writer of this diary?
Matthew Tomlinson was a widower, in his 40s when he wrote his journal in 1810 - a man of a "middling" class, not a poor labourer but not rich enough to own his own land.
"I try and imagine how he would have looked," says library manager Ms Pickering.
There are no pictures of Tomlinson, who is thought to have lived between about 1770 and 1850.
"Very dour," she suggests. And a "bit of a hypochondriac".
There are thousands of pages of handwritten journals - but some volumes appear to have been lost
"I imagine if you stopped him at his gate for a chat he'd talk about his gout more than anything else.
"I'd love to have a conversation with him about what Wakefield was like at the time," she says.
No-one knows how these private diaries, covering 1806 to 1839, ended up in Wakefield Library, but they were there by the 1950s and are presumed to be part of an earlier acquisition of old books and local documents.
There are three surviving volumes and at least another eight are missing.
But they show vivid detail about life in Wakefield in the early 19th Century.
Tomlinson, from his home at Doghouse Farm, recorded the life of nearby Wakefield
During elections, Tomlinson was appalled by the corruption, the rum drinkers having to be carried home in wheelbarrows and the "hired ruffians".
And at Queen Victoria's coronation he was sceptical about expensive ceremonies and celebrations, calling them all "humbug".
This was not a closed world. His social circle seemed to be avid readers of books and newspapers, following reports of revolutions abroad and riots and insurrections at home.
They saw elephants marching through Wakefield in a circus parade and military bands who had competed to hire the most talented black musicians.
We know where he lived - Doghouse Farm in Lupset, because he carefully wrote it on the front of his journals.
The farm, at the edge of the landowner's estate, is now under a housing estate and a golf course. All that survives are his diaries.
