Peter Parker: -on meeting Loki, offers his hand- Hi, I’m Peter!
Loki: -shakes his hand- Loki of Asgard.
Peter: Aren’t you like…a bad guy?
Loki: It varies from moment to moment.
Peter: So like…on a scale of one to ten, ten being the worst evil imaginable, like…killing puppies, and one being I’ll spit on your hotdog…where are you right now?
Loki: …maybe a three?
Peter: Cool. Lemme know if it gets above a six.
Loki: -thinking- I like him.
It had been a joke, a flippant line, but somehow, Loki found himself taking the youth up on it.
It was hard living around these heroic Avengers, hard trying to stay close to Thor. And when he felt his need for mischief rise too high, when he felt exasperation with these Midgardians turn too close to spite, he would casually say “Six.” to the young man, or sometimes “Seven.”
And Peter would spend the rest of his day with Loki. He would badger him with questions about magic, or drag him across his beloved city to see its entertainments, or take him along stopping petty crimes. He grounded Loki to the here and now, and distracted him from the churning, jagged shards of ice in his mind.
WE NEED LOKI AND PETER FICS
Yeah, the people who write the comics agree with you
imagine if someone really pissed Loki off and he turns to Peter and just “IT’s A TEN, CHILD”
Peter: OH SHIT. EVERYBODY EVACUATE THE CIVILIANS
@shesellsseagulls I know this isn’t your normal shtick, but IMAGINE!
ANYTHING with peter is 100% my shtick and I am HERE FOR THIS.
I’m gonna write this. Just give me a bit.
Okay its short and probably really shit, but here we go.
“Hi, I’m Peter.” Loki stares in brief shock at the boy smiling up at him and waiting for his outstretched hand to be shook. People didn’t usually react well to meeting him.
“Loki of Asgard,” Loki answered politely, shaking Peter’s hand.
“Aren’t you like… a bad guy?” Peter asked with such wide, innocent eyes that Loki felt an urge to run away before he ruined that innocence as he had done with so many other things.
“It varies from moment to moment.” Loki tried to act disinterested, but he was worried that his expression may be mirroring Peter’s.
“So like… on a scale of one to ten, ten being the worst evil imaginable, like… killing puppies, and one being I’ll spit on your hotdog… where are you right now?”
“Maybe a three.” Thor was staring at them, and Loki didn’t have to look to know that his brother was grinning at how well the introduction was going.
“Cool,” Peter smiled brightly. “Let me know if it gets above a six.”
Loki nodded slightly and stared in absolute amazement at this child who handled meeting a villain so well. I like him, the god thought quietly.
It had obviously been a joke, but Loki had found himself saying a number every time he saw Peter. Whenever it was above a six, Peter would drop everything and just spend the rest of the day hanging out with Loki. It usually wasn’t more than a seven, and Peter was always worried about what would happen if it got to a ten. So far, he had been lucky, but one day that luck would run out.
They were at a coffee shop, waiting quietly to order their treats and go, causing absolutely no problems. When they got to the counter, though, the guy took Peter’s order and refused to acknowledge Loki’s presence.
“Excuse me,” Loki said quietly, trying to get the man’s attention.
“Sorry, we don’t serve evil here.”
“Well then, it’s a good thing I’m not ordering any. I’d just like a chai latte, please.” Loki resisted the urge to glare at the man, choosing to smile politely instead.
“What, are you gonna kill me if I don’t serve you?” The man laughed and turned around to continue making Peter’s coffee.
“No, but I would like to speak with whomever is in charge here.” Loki gritted his teeth and tried to stay calm.
“Oh, you wanna talk to my manager?” The guy laughed again. “Why don’t you just leave, asshole?”
Loki took a slow breathe through his nose, and slammed his fist down on the counter. He turned to Peter, shouting, “IT’S A TEN, CHILD!”
Peter, not knowing what to do, launched himself onto Loki, and started dragging him away before he hurt someone.
“You don’t have to go, kid. You didn’t do anything wrong.” The guys smiled as if nothing had happened, and offered Peter his coffee.
“Hey, you’re being a dick to my friend. I don’t want to stay here. You can’t just treat people like that!” Loki grabbed Peter’s arm and tried to get him to keep walking before they got into trouble. “He hasn’t done anything wrong in years! What gives you the right to act like you’re so much better than him? He made a mistake. Have you never made a mistake before?”
Peter shot a web at a blender behind the man without thinking, and he pulled it forward, hitting him in the back of the head. Someone screamed, and Loki started laughing hysterically and pulled on Peter’s arm.
“You’re going to get us in trouble,” Loki shouted over the other people’s yelling.
Too late, thought Peter when the sound of police sirens brought him back to reality.
He paled and yelled, “Shit!” Loki wrapped his arms around Peter and teleported them back to the Avengers tower. Peter glanced around in shock, having forgotten that Loki can teleport.
“We’re in so much trouble,” he groaned, giving up on life and dropping his head against Loki’s chest. Loki, not really knowing what to do, continued to hug Peter.
“I’ll say I did it,” Loki decided. Before Peter could protest, he added, “They’d expect if from me.”
Peter stepped back to look up at Loki. “Fine, but if they try to actually do anything about it, I’m telling Mr Stark what really happened.”
Loki’s heart melted, and he couldn’t help but smile. Loki’s hand moved to cup Peter’s cheek for a moment. “You’re such a sweet child.” He hugged Peter briefly before saying, “You should probably go establish an alibi.” Peter nodded and ran off, leaving Loki to think about how great his friend is.
Posting this here because someone might just find this relatable. A comic I drew as therapy, to help me get over some big creative issues I’ve been dealing with recently. Hope it can help some of you as well.
A decade ago, when Amazon acquired Audible, the two companies promised that they’d phase out their DRM,
which locked listeners into using their proprietary software and
devices to enjoy the books they purchased. Audible never made good on
that promise, and stonewalled press queries and industry requests about when, exactly, this fairtrade version of their industry-dominating audiobook store would finally emerge.
Ten years later, Audible controls more than 90% of the audiobook market,
making it the last bastion of DRM in audiobooks – competitors like Downpour and Libro.fm sell all the same books without DRM, and the audiobooks you get at your local library have been DRM-free for years.
It’s not surprising that Amazon would choose to use an illegitimate,
anticompetitive technology to lock its customers (and suppliers) in.
Once you control 90% of a market, you are more likely to lose users than
gain them, and so anything you can do to lock those users in to your
platform helps you more than it hurts. It’s a signature Big Tech move,
the kind of thing that monopolies use to shore up their dominance for
the long term.
I saw this writing on the wall more than a decade ago. I’ve given up
hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost income by refusing to allow my
audiobooks to be sold with DRM. I even created my own audiobook store so I’d have somewhere
to sell my books. Every time I’ve dealt with someone from Amazon, I’ve
asked them to look into the long-promised DRM-free store for me, and
every time, they’ve promised they would – but no one has ever gotten
back to me.
It’s a far cry from the Amazon MP3 Store, which pioneered DRM-free music
downloads the same year the company bought Audible. Back then, Amazon’s
slogan was “DRM: DON’T RESTRICT ME.”
Of course, Amazon’s DRM-free music store was a collaboration with the
record labels to break Apple’s monopoly over online music (and a couple
years later, Apple followed them into DRM-free land and dropped DRM from
all their music). When Amazon is trying to seize control, DRM is the
enemy; when it attains control, DRM is a must-have.
Now it’s Amazon’s turn in the hot seat.
Google has just launched a DRM-free audiobook store that duplicates
nearly the entire catalog at Audible. When you buy your audiobooks from
Google Play you can download them to any device, play it on any device,
convert them, archive them, back them up. If you decide you don’t want
to use Google products in the future, you won’t lose your audiobooks.
It’s fucking amazing.
Google’s native audiobook player has a lot of cool bells and whistles,
of course (access through Google Assistant and Google Home, synch across
multiple devices, tunable playback speed), but the most important thing
is that you aren’t restricted to using that player. If you don’t like
those features, or if you like someone else’s features better, you’re
able to jump ship, and take your books with you.
I’ve gotten to know a lot of people in the audiobook market, and they’ve
all been praying for an alternative to Audible. When Google quietly
informed the publishing world that they were launching a DRM-free
competitor, I immediately heard from multiple, competing major
publishers who wanted to buy the rights to sell my books, now that there
was a store with major backing where they could be sold.
After considering several offers, I’ve signed up with Macmillan Audio to
publish my next audiobook as a Google Play exclusive (at least for
launch time – and I’ll still be selling it through my own little
author-operated store).
What’s that audiobook? Well, that’s the other cool thing I get to talk
about today. My novella “Authorized Bread” has been bought for a
pleasingly large sum of money by Tor Books in the USA, with
UK/Australian/NZ publication by Head of Zeus and German publication by
Heyne. There’s an accompanying screen deal whose details I’ll be
announcing shortly. It’ll be published early this fall, with an
all-DRM-free Macmillan audio edition.
“Unauthorized Bread” is a story about refugees, inequality, DRM, and
class struggle. Its heroine, Salima, is an Arab woman, and I have
Macmillan’s commitment to hire a voice actor of Arabic origin to narrate
the audiobook. And just as I was able to do with my self-funded indie
audiobooks, I’ll be in the studio while the audiobook is recorded, able
to give advice on line readings.
Today is a day that a lot of people have waited a long time for. Market
concentration is a modern scourge, but even by contemporary standards,
the audiobook market is a disaster, with a single company in a position
of total dominance that it uses to squeeze writers, actors, production
staff, publishers, and, ultimately, customers. Anyone who signs an
Audible-only deal for their books after today is an idiot; and anyone
who buys another DRM-locked Audible book after this is just asking to be
kicked in the pants by a giant, uncaring monopolist that has abused its
dominance for a decade.
It was kind of a dick move to create animals that require air, then confine them to the freaking ocean
If you are talking about dolphins they used to be wolf like creatures that due to scarcity of food they had to hunt in water so they slowly evolved into water mammals, dolphins still have claw bones but they are unnecessary and dolphins will get rid of them with time and will develop abilities to breath under water
Thank you so much!!!! Ancestral creatures are Gorgeous, Valid, Perfectly Reasonable things with legs.
In regards to the first comment, most things in the ocean perform gas exchange anyway so it isn’t that bold of a move – in some respects it’s kind of a fool’s move of terrestrial animals to leave the saline bath that life started off in, since we now have to lug our dumb bodies around, full of carefully balanced metaphorical-saltwater, because our cells are just Like That
regarding the second comment on this thread, dolphins are probably fine mostly as they are, and I would not expect them to “lose” attributes to demonstrate their “evolving/progressing away from their origins.“ People think that evolution is like an unstoppable escalator that either kills you or forcibly moves you from primitive things to sophisticated things, but it isn’t. Things don’t become More Thingish with Time, that’s not how evolution works.
There is no particular evolutionary pressure on dolphins to lose traits that suit their lifestyles perfectly well. Most of the high-pressure challenges that wild dolphins face today – fishing activities, pollution, habitat destruction, food network disruption and climate change – are not going to exert evolutionary pressure on remnant bones; and the act of breathing appears to be as natural to dolphins as, well, breathing.
For example, being able to breathe surface air means that dolphins and whales can move through water that has very low quantities of oxygen (such as highly polluted water) where fish cannot survive, because there is not enough oxygen diffused in the water to maintain a constant supply for fish; whales and dolphins can simply surface to take a gulp of air.
With enormous lungs that are adapted to holding breath for incredibly long periods of time, whales and dolphins can essentially scuba-dive to areas of the ocean that other animals cannot access, as well as eying up things above the surface of the water. In a rapidly changing environment, with food/climate/water all doing things they’ve NEVER done before, this offbeat mammalian funkiness may even be the key towards sticking around and surviving a weird period of history.
Anyway, these are Valid Historical Legges, and evolution is not a straight line from Bad Animals to Good Progressive Animals. As evidenced by how excellent and powerful these ancestral beasties are. They may be ancestral but they are MAGNIFICENT
pictured: a good girl, valid and perfect in herself, a stage of someone else’s evolution but also perfectly complete in herself, somebody’s daughter and somebody’s ancestor but also just somebody in her own right, perhaps not as good at swimming as the cetaceans of the future, but perfectly acceptable in her moment of history, and in all other moments
when i was a little kid, i didn’t care for movies. my parents always admonished me for sitting too close to the screen or fidgeting too much, so i turned to books instead. when i was four, i tried to watch the first harry potter movie. i absolutely loved it, but it wasn’t enough for me. i had to get my hands on that book. the teachers at pre-school said it was a horrible idea, but i read the first two books anyway.
then came kindergarten. the teachers scolded my parents for letting me bring novels to school. “she can’t possibly understand them,” they said. so they gave me tests on the books. i made perfect scores on all of them. i preferred books to movies and television; movies didn’t do justice to the stories i loved.
so, they marked me down as a “gifted child.” they tested my IQ and everything. i was the perfect student, in their eyes. i sat in the front and listened to the teachers as intently as i could.
one day after school, i ran up to my mother and hugged her. then, i turned my head and saw my mother walking towards me. i looked up at the woman i had hugged. “you’re not my mother,” i said, astutely.
my mother, a clever woman, thought to have my eyesight tested. turns out, i had horrible vision. somewhere around 20/450. functionally blind without glasses. not ideal for anyone, especially a six year old.
all my life until that point, people thought i must be some sort of brilliant prodigy, eschewing television and movies for more intellectual pursuits, but actually i just couldn’t fucking see lol
This took a different direction than I was expecting.
