croik

Fandom 50 #16

Untitled Narwhal!Merman Izzy by MegaDucko
Fandom: Our Flag Means Death
Character/Relationship: Izzy Hands (Izzy Hands/Edward Teach in framing text)
Medium: Art
Length: 1 piece
Rating: SFW
My Bookmark Tags: slice of life, romance, ambiguous ending, established relationship, au: merpeople, long-distance relationship, gifts, nature
Artist's Summary: For 27 years now Ed has been bringing Izzy, his sea unicorn, small gifts every time he returns from a particularly lucky raid and those are Izzy's happiest moments...

Description:

Merman Izzy, his lower half the mottled grey tail of a narwhal and his brow sporting a long horn, lounges kelp-draped on a rocky shore. He's adorned with a bracelet and an earring, and protected in a small grotto beside him is a collection of other trinkets.

Izzy's status as the ship's unicorn has a special place in my heart, and bringing this together with a merperson AU to give us Izzy as a narwhal-style merman is just brilliant. And as always, MegaDucko has realized a brilliant concept beautifully.

The setting is perfect for Izzy, with his sturdy build and scars: not white sand and crystal-blue waters but a more rugged and cooler coastline, beautiful in its own way but not conventionally idyllic. The overall design of his body feels so natural despite its fantastical construction, with the way his musculature and colouring blends together between top half and bottom, and with the way he's got his tail curled around, dripping water on himself. Curled over his gifts from his sailor-love, it's easy to see that piece of land he's cuddling up to as a proxy for Ed. His expression perfectly strikes the balance between contentment and yearning, and I'm firmly opting for the happier ending discussed in the artist's thread.

✓ kingstoken's 2025 Book Bingo: Over 300 Pages

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams is a 2025 tell-all about the author's time as Facebook's Director of Global Public Policy in the 2010s. The book focuses on the ill-preparedness of Facebook executives to navigate the geopolitical situations they inserted themselves into in their obsession with perpetual expansion, including their role in the Rohingya genocide, as well as the general bizarre work environment and the sexual harassment that the author experienced.

Wynn-Williams comes off as a deeply careless person herself, albeit one buoyed along on a slightly different type of inflated self-importance than her former colleagues. There's a lot of what feels like completely unreflected-upon self-incrimination in the book that lends credibility to her stories. The seams show clearly enough where she's edited her interactions with others (usually to give herself the winning last word in conversations that clearly would have continued) that I'm inclined to believe the bulk of what's there, even if I don't buy the characterization of her responses or her assessment of her own moral fibre.

When this book first came out, I wondered if reading it was going to feel redundant alongside all the media coverage it was surely going to get. But the gag order Facebook imposed on the author banning her from promoting the book—combined with the avalanche of other news in early 2025 about tech billionaires dismantling democracy—seemed to result in fewer articles about the content crossing my path than I would have expected. For that reason, I'm glad I took the time to read it.

Also, it's worth noting that in my searching, I found many results on other search engines that didn't turn up on Google, even when they involved sources that Google usually indexes.

( An Excerpt )