im tired of him

“No cost too great, no mind to think, no will to break, no voice to cry suffering.”

I am going to think about this piece of art for a very long time. Just... SO beautiful. Tragedy and horror in equal measure.

Anything that gives hope is a good thing.

There are a lot of encouraging facts in this article. Reading it was the high point of my morning so far. The Rule of Law is far from dead, Republicans are afraid of special elections, SignalGate has gone viral, etc.

Lmfao I said to my sibling (whose whole knowledge of ST comes from my deranged info dumps) "Do you ever get invested in a ship that's completely ridiculous"

And they went yeah, I'll bite what is it, so I showed them a pic of Dukat and Sisko. And they were like "Aren't those to canon already??" And I was like "???! GOD I hope not???"

And then it hit me that OH, they were thinking of when I told them Bashir and Garak were canon in Lower Decks!

So I went haha nope different lizard! These are the ones who are canon! And they looked at the picture of Julian and Garak and deadass went "those are literally the same two guys" I-

If the Dukat/Sisko ship name is anything other than Disko I'm going to flip

Cosmic alignment…

Fuck all of the good luck posts out there. Reblog this to immaculate your vibes

Hey folks, I'm writing my Vulcan exchange fic and I've gotten to a point where Keiko found out her husband celebrated Julian leaving the station and she is pissed.

I actually see Julian getting along with Keiko, though not to the point he does with Miles or Garak (who is also a bestie of Keiko's since she loves hearing about the plants of Cardassia and hearing about his uncle growing Endosian orchids when it should have been impossible).

So I'm sending out a call for help: please, all fans of Keiko who got unfairly shafted by the show, give me some thoughts on how the two were friends and the things they did. I already have that Keiko would use Julian as a sounding board and he learns he's just meant to sit there and let Keiko vent when Miles does something insensitive, and maybe she saw him reading an article on medicinal plants or he came to her about them and the two just started talking. Please, any little tidbits you can send my way would help the story as I simply can't believe that everyone found Julian intolerable in the first three seasons (this takes place after The Die is cast and The Adversary but before Way of the Warrior).

I'd like to think they plot. I recall a scene where Keiko tells O'Brien that Julian been depressed and that he should go to the holosuite with him to cheer him up... and the second O'Brien is out the door she calls Julian like "Don't tell Miles I said anything, but... he's been depressed lately... :("

I'm convinced Julian's augmented mind puts it together, or Miles tells him, and he and Keiko start hanging out to make plans, talk about the arboretum, upcoming festivals... so on. I like to think it's gossip a little to the left, like with the intention of helping. "Vilix'pran will be budding soon... what should we get for the baby shower?"

Also like to think he maybe trusts Keiko enough to tell her about the augmentations (imagine - he trusts her to keep a secret more than Garak) and she just outright says stuff like "do you think you can find a new formula for Vilix's hatchlings?"

The ideas are out there, and they're great

This is his official portrait for when he's talking, you could probably crop a couple dialogue images with his sprite in them?

I love this scene. Bashir finds out that a dangerous member of the Cardassian military knows him by name, so he questions him to his face, and then decides to bring his situationship down with him.

Sisko's reactions are my favorite part.

They're very smiley this episode (Season 2 Episode 5)

↑ Do we think he's genuinely smiling here (unsure) (please confirm or deny)

I am 1. very unserious 2. learning digital art, so here is Julian, Garak and Ziyal at a Marlok Gan concert - and if you don't know who Marlok Gan is, you should probably 1. read my fic where he comes from (https://archiveofourown.org/works/63713482) 2. idk, start stanning immediately?

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)

🎬 Peter Jackson

+ IMDb trivia (FotR trivia)

Who. THE FUCK. did Peter Jackson sell his soul to for those films?

Being Muslim is just getting scarier and scarier, so if you’re non-Muslim and care about us please do anything you can to show it. Nothing is too small, from checking in to make sure we’re alright, shutting down islamophobic hate speech, defending us against hate crimes, donating to or servicing our mosques, protesting with us and for our causes, etc. just do whatever you can to let us know you’re on our side through the next four years and beyond.

I am not Muslim, but please know this is a Muslim safe blog. Thank you for these suggestions.

REBLOG IF YOIR BLOG IS MUSLIM-SAFE

DONT BE A DICK, MAN.

Julian Bashir's Eyelashes Appreciation Post:

Bonus fluttering gif:

Damn.

The Grid: Where High Performance Loses the Self

Letter I: Descent into the Grid

There are words that pitch. And there are words that pierce.

This letter is neither content nor commentary. It is a signal—broadcast from within the system, toward those who suspect there’s something underneath it.

I’ve written it for the strategist who senses they’ve traded presence for precision. For the operator whose performance is flawless—but whose soul has gone silent. For the leader who no longer wants to lead from absence.

This is not a whitepaper. It is a mirror.

If you're here, you're already reading between the lines.

There comes a point in any high-performance journey where metrics blur.

The dashboards stay green. The calendar fills with opportunity. The pipeline surges with promise.

But beneath it all, a quiet erosion begins—one too subtle for a CRM to track.

This is not about burnout in the typical sense. It's not about being “tired” or “stressed.”

This is something more precise. More existential.

It’s the experience of scaling success while silently suspecting you’ve become disconnected from the very reasons you began.

In cybersecurity, we are trained to identify threats, minimize exposure, and build architectures of control. But no one teaches us what to do when the threat originates internally—not from malice, but from disintegration. A slow, gradual detachment from the self beneath the strategist.

I call this experience the Grid.

The Grid is invisible, yet intimately known. It’s built not from code, but from conditioning—accolades, quotas, expectations. It rewards performance but punishes presence. It values velocity over alignment, outcome over awareness.

It is the architecture that shapes the architect.

And for years, I was inside it—executing with precision, leading teams, landing enterprise deals, exceeding benchmarks.

But I couldn’t feel any of it.

The more I achieved, the more I sensed a widening gap—between the motions I performed and the meaning I longed for. Between the external sophistication and the internal silence.

This letter is not a confession. It’s a beginning.

Because once you recognize the Grid for what it is—a construct—you begin to see its edges. You start to realize that the frameworks we deploy to secure networks have spiritual analogs. That Zero Trust is not only a cybersecurity model; it’s a philosophy of discernment. That Privileged Access Management is not only about credentials, but about understanding what parts of ourselves we’ve locked away, and why.

The real innovation, I’ve come to believe, will not be found solely in AI integrations or predictive analytics. It will emerge from those leaders willing to re-integrate the human signal into the system. The founder who pauses before the pitch. The seller who listens without agenda. The executive who reclaims silence as strategy.

And it’s there—in that uncomfortable space—that reinvention begins.

The systems we build reflect the signals we emit. And the most resilient systems will come from those who’ve made space for their own humanity.

I am not writing this to posture. I am writing because I want to re-establish contact—with others who are building the future but feel something missing in the present. With those who sense there’s a way to do this—business, leadership, impact—without splitting the soul from the strategy.

If any part of this resonates with you, then you already know: You’re not alone. You’re not off track. You’re simply approaching a threshold.

The Grid is vast, but not absolute. And once you see it—you begin the work of stepping beyond it.

— @leonbasinwriter Enterprise Strategist | Scroll Keeper | Human in Progress www.basinleon.com

Source: The Grid: Where High Performance Loses the Self

Hot diggity damn, this was an astounding read for only five notes

THISSSSSS 👆🏼👆🏼👆🏼

Reading darkfic only gives me empathy for the characters, doesn't make me evil.

How's this for a hot take?

Consuming dark fiction, though it allows the audience to empathise with morally dubious or outright evil characters, nonetheless increases their overall amount of internal empathy towards other people. Not just bad people benefit from an overall increase in empathy.

Consuming exclusively sanitised, fluffy feel-good fiction with no counterbalancing dark sides does not increase the audience's empathy, because anyone who cannot empathise with The Littlest Cinnamon Roll, who has adventures dealing with happiness and friendship and harmony, is already a lost cause. Rather, such fiction, when all other kinds are excluded, normalises the idea that the only people worth empathising with are the morally pure cinnamon rolls who have never done anything wrong in their entire lives. The normalisation, and reinforcement of same through the standard life cycle of a fandom, reaches such a point that as soon as the characters in question step outside the boundaries of that bubble of innocence by doing (1) problematic thing, they are cancelled for crimes against humanity and the fandom tears itself apart.

This is my explanation for not only why fandoms for fun kids' shows tear themselves apart over the slightest perceived creative slip-up, but also why the most passionately engaged fans of these things (who more often than not precipitate the rot/collapse) tend to be such toxic people in all other spheres of life as well.

Scalding. I dare say boiling. Bravo