#At The End of the Road

[angeart]

Everything builds around them like a mirage, but it’s an illusion Grian’s willingly sinking into, unaware of its treacherous edges. Because how could anything bad happen, when Scar stammers in such an endearing way that makes Grian want to titter stupidly? How could anything bad happen when Scar beams and grins and laughs, the sound reverberating against Grian’s fingertips? How could anything bad happen when this is what they’re allowed to have?

—hhau, will i find my home, my home, my home in you?

[fidjiefidjie]

Bon Matin 🆕️ 🎸🛣 💙

EggS 🎶 At The End Of The Road

(Crafted Achievement)

[moorswanderer]

don’t even think about leaving me. i won’t let you.

[jagzii]

"I know I usually write about films and TV shows on Fridays, but I have to be honest. Sometimes I don’t watch things in time to write anything, or, conversely, I watch stuff I feel no desire to write about. That being the case, I decided there was really only one appropriate course of action... make a list recommending the stories I have been consuming this week instead. Which, in this case, are mostly manga and webtoons."

Read the rest here:

[faithful91]

hi! so, i came across your blog while looking thru the jinx tag, and you seem to read a lot! so i'm wondering if you know any other manga/manhwa with similar dynamic between the two main characters like in mingwa's jinx (where one of them is toxic or cruel towards the other, but they end up together). completed only, and the toxic one is apologetic/regrets his actions.

please feel free to ignore this ask if you don't do rec, or just don't want to do this one! no obligations at all, and i'm sorry if i'm intruding!

𝘔𝘰𝘴𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘵𝘰𝘹𝘪𝘤 𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘴 𝘐 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘥 𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘰𝘯𝘨𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘣𝘶𝘵 𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦’𝘴 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦 “𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘱𝘭𝘦𝘵𝘦𝘥” 𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘴.

- 𝘐𝘧 𝘠𝘰𝘶 𝘏𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘔𝘦 (𝘔𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘢)

- 𝘒𝘪𝘴𝘴 𝘔𝘦 𝘓𝘪𝘢𝘳 (𝘔𝘢𝘯𝘩𝘸𝘢)

- 𝘗𝘢𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘦 𝘖𝘧 𝘉𝘢𝘳𝘥𝘰 (𝘔𝘢𝘯𝘩𝘸𝘢)

- 𝘈𝘵 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘌𝘯𝘥 𝘖𝘧 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘙𝘰𝘢𝘥 (𝘔𝘢𝘯𝘩𝘶𝘢)

- 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘎𝘢𝘱 (𝘔𝘢𝘯𝘩𝘸𝘢)

- 𝘉𝘑 𝘈𝘭𝘦𝘹 (𝘉𝘶𝘵 𝘐 𝘢𝘴𝘴𝘶𝘮𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘢𝘭𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘺 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘥 𝘪𝘵)

ᴾ.ˢ. ᴵ’ˡˡ ᵏᵉᵉᵖ ᵃᵈᵈⁱⁿᵍ ᵗᵒ ᵗʰᵉ ˡⁱˢᵗ ᵉᵛᵉʳʸ ᵗⁱᵐᵉ ᴵ ʳᵉᵐᵉᵐᵇᵉʳ ᵒⁿᵉ.

[bebebisous33]

Jinx / At The End Of The Road: Tattooed identity 🐲

#Jinxmanhwa #Jinx #Kimdan #JooJaekyung #징크스 The essay "Tattooed identity 🐲" is finished. I hope you'll like it. It will be locked. Don't forget, it's the new password. Retweet/like it as support. Thanks. If you want the password, please contact me here bebebisous33@yahoo.com

Please support the authors by reading the manhwas on the official websites. This is where you can read the manhwas. At the end of the road: https://www.lezhinus.com/en/comic/attheend Jinx:https://www.lezhinus.com/en/comic/jinx_en  But be aware that this manhwa is a mature Yaoi, which means, it is about homosexuality with explicit scenes. Here are the links, if you are interested in the first work…

[fateoas]

[espiritogato]

[ngtskynebula]

I just finished the At The End Of The Road webcomic, by Haribo. It's, uh... well. That finale was anticlimatic, but it's understandable seeing as it was the creator's first project; everyone's first everything is always dumb.

I found out about it because the AO3 JeongShua fic writer @/authormin wrote a fic based on this comic's plot a few years ago, and since the fanfic has been on hiatus, I looked up the comic to know what happened in the story. The premise is creative, buuut the narrative could've been handled a lot better, I believe.

If I were to work on a rewrite, those assholes involved with the gang rape would've suffered everything there is to suffer. I also think the younger brother's character felt flat, and more annoying than anything. In fact, I'd have to rework the entire cast...

This webcomic's greatest asset is its premise, because the execution was kinda meh. I don't really recommend the reading, but I'd enjoy writing my own JeongShua rendition 🤔

[mostlysignssomeportents]

“If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing”

20 years ago, I got in a (friendly) public spat with Chris Anderson, who was then the editor in chief of Wired. I'd publicly noted my disappointment with glowing Wired reviews of DRM-encumbered digital devices, prompting Anderson to call me unrealistic for expecting the magazine to condemn gadgets for their DRM:

https://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2004/12/is_drm_evil.html

I replied in public, telling him that he'd misunderstood. This wasn't an issue of ideological purity – it was about good reviewing practice. Wired was telling readers to buy a product because it had features x, y and z, but at any time in the future, without warning, without recourse, the vendor could switch off any of those features:

https://memex.craphound.com/2004/12/29/cory-responds-to-wired-editor-on-drm/

I proposed that all Wired endorsements for DRM-encumbered products should come with this disclaimer:

WARNING: THIS DEVICE’S FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE, ACCORDING TO TERMS SET OUT IN SECRET NEGOTIATIONS. YOUR INVESTMENT IS CONTINGENT ON THE GOODWILL OF THE WORLD’S MOST PARANOID, TECHNOPHOBIC ENTERTAINMENT EXECS. THIS DEVICE AND DEVICES LIKE IT ARE TYPICALLY USED TO CHARGE YOU FOR THINGS YOU USED TO GET FOR FREE — BE SURE TO FACTOR IN THE PRICE OF BUYING ALL YOUR MEDIA OVER AND OVER AGAIN. AT NO TIME IN HISTORY HAS ANY ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY GOTTEN A SWEET DEAL LIKE THIS FROM THE ELECTRONICS PEOPLE, BUT THIS TIME THEY’RE GETTING A TOTAL WALK. HERE, PUT THIS IN YOUR MOUTH, IT’LL MUFFLE YOUR WHIMPERS.

Wired didn't take me up on this suggestion.

But I was right. The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations. Inkjet printers were always a sleazy business, but once these printers got directly connected to the internet, companies like HP started pushing out "security updates" that modified your printer to make it reject the third-party ink you'd paid for:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Now, this scam wouldn't work if you could just put things back the way they were before the "update," which is where the DRM comes in. A thicket of IP laws make reverse-engineering DRM-encumbered products into a felony. Combine always-on network access with indiscriminate criminalization of user modification, and the enshittification will follow, as surely as night follows day.

This is the root of all the right to repair shenanigans. Sure, companies withhold access to diagnostic codes and parts, but codes can be extracted and parts can be cloned. The real teeth in blocking repair comes from the law, not the tech. The company that makes McDonald's wildly unreliable McFlurry machines makes a fortune charging franchisees to fix these eternally broken appliances. When a third party threatened this racket by reverse-engineering the DRM that blocked independent repair, they got buried in legal threats:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war

Everybody loves this racket. In Poland, a team of security researchers at the OhMyHack conference just presented their teardown of the anti-repair features in NEWAG Impuls locomotives. NEWAG boobytrapped their trains to try and detect if they've been independently serviced, and to respond to any unauthorized repairs by bricking themselves:

https://mamot.fr/@q3k@hackerspace.pl/111528162905209453

Poland is part of the EU, meaning that they are required to uphold the provisions of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive, including Article 6, which bans this kind of reverse-engineering. The researchers are planning to present their work again at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg this month – Germany is also a party to the EUCD. The threat to researchers from presenting this work is real – but so is the threat to conferences that host them:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/researchers-face-legal-threats-over-sdmi-hack/

20 years ago, Chris Anderson told me that it was unrealistic to expect tech companies to refuse demands for DRM from the entertainment companies whose media they hoped to play. My argument – then and now – was that any tech company that sells you a gadget that can have its features revoked is defrauding you. You're paying for x, y and z – and if they are contractually required to remove x and y on demand, they are selling you something that you can't rely on, without making that clear to you.

But it's worse than that. When a tech company designs a device for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades, they invite both external and internal parties to demand those downgrades. Like Pavel Chekov says, a phaser on the bridge in Act I is going to go off by Act III. Selling a product that can be remotely, irreversibly, nonconsensually downgraded inevitably results in the worst person at the product-planning meeting proposing to do so. The fact that there are no penalties for doing so makes it impossible for the better people in that meeting to win the ensuing argument, leading to the moral injury of seeing a product you care about reduced to a pile of shit:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

But even if everyone at that table is a swell egg who wouldn't dream of enshittifying the product, the existence of a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature makes the product vulnerable to external actors who will demand that it be used. Back in 2022, Adobe informed its customers that it had lost its deal to include Pantone colors in Photoshop, Illustrator and other "software as a service" packages. As a result, users would now have to start paying a monthly fee to see their own, completed images. Fail to pay the fee and all the Pantone-coded pixels in your artwork would just show up as black:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process

Adobe blamed this on Pantone, and there was lots of speculation about what had happened. Had Pantone jacked up its price to Adobe, so Adobe passed the price on to its users in the hopes of embarrassing Pantone? Who knows? Who can know? That's the point: you invested in Photoshop, you spent money and time creating images with it, but you have no way to know whether or how you'll be able to access those images in the future. Those terms can change at any time, and if you don't like it, you can go fuck yourself.

These companies are all run by CEOs who got their MBAs at Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further." Adobe chose to design its software so it would be vulnerable to this kind of demand, and then its customers paid for that choice. Sure, Pantone are dicks, but this is Adobe's fault. They stuck a KICK ME sign to your back, and Pantone obliged.

This keeps happening and it's gonna keep happening. Last week, Playstation owners who'd bought (or "bought") Warner TV shows got messages telling them that Warner had walked away from its deal to sell videos through the Playstation store, and so all the videos they'd paid for were going to be deleted forever. They wouldn't even get refunds (to be clear, refunds would also be bullshit – when I was a bookseller, I didn't get to break into your house and steal the books I'd sold you, not even if I left some cash on your kitchen table).

Sure, Warner is an unbelievably shitty company run by the single most guillotineable executive in all of Southern California, the loathsome David Zaslav, who oversaw the merger of Warner with Discovery. Zaslav is the creep who figured out that he could make more money cancelling completed movies and TV shows and taking a tax writeoff than he stood to make by releasing them:

https://aftermath.site/there-is-no-piracy-without-ownership

Imagine putting years of your life into making a program – showing up on set at 5AM and leaving your kids to get their own breakfast, performing stunts that could maim or kill you, working 16-hour days during the acute phase of the covid pandemic and driving home in the night, only to have this absolute turd of a man delete the program before anyone could see it, forever, to get a minor tax advantage. Talk about moral injury!

But without Sony's complicity in designing a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature into the Playstation, Zaslav's war on art and creative workers would be limited to material that hadn't been released yet. Thanks to Sony's awful choices, David Zaslav can break into your house, steal your movies – and he doesn't even have to leave a twenty on your kitchen table.

The point here – the point I made 20 years ago to Chris Anderson – is that this is the foreseeable, inevitable result of designing devices for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades. Anyone who was paying attention should have figured that out in the GW Bush administration. Anyone who does this today? Absolute flaming garbage.

Sure, Zaslav deserves to be staked out over an anthill and slathered in high-fructose corn syrup. But save the next anthill for the Sony exec who shipped a product that would let Zaslav come into your home and rob you. That piece of shit knew what they were doing and they did it anyway. Fuck them. Sideways. With a brick.

Meanwhile, the studios keep making the case for stealing movies rather than paying for them. As Tyler James Hill wrote: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing":

https://bsky.app/profile/tylerjameshill.bsky.social/post/3kflw2lvam42n

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-james-hill

Image: Alan Levine (modified) https://pxhere.com/en/photo/218986

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[kingofbodyrolls]

I finished writing the last two chapters 🎉 I will upload them as soon as I've done some editing/reread. But damn it's been a rollercoaster; started out truly hyped, writing was easy, then frustration/writers block, but I managed to find the spark again and I'm actually really proud of the last chapters 🥺 I'm gonna miss this Yoongi, reader and certainly also their chaotic friend group with all their sexual teasing 😝 this was such an amazing road trip - thanks to everybody who has read it so far, and also taken the time to comment or reblog, it means so much to me THANK YOU 🫶🏾♥️

Friendcation (m) | myg | series masterlist

Summary: Going camping with your best friends seemed like a brilliant idea when you initially made the plans. But when you harbor secret feelings for one of them, what will become of you being close confined for three months? Trouble, that’s what.

Pairing: Yoongi x reader (female, “Y/N”)

Other characters: Jimin, Jungkook, Taehyung, Namjoon, Hoseok and Seokjin.

Genre/AU: Best friends to best friends with benefits to lovers, non idol!au, camping!au, roadtrip!au, mechanic!Yoongi, humor, slight angst, smut and fluff

Rating: mature/explicit/R18

Word count: TBA (currently still writing it)

Warnings/tags: will be tagged for each individual chapter. But it does contain smut, almost in every chapter (not the first though).

Taglist: The taglist is open, and you can write a comment if you want to be tagged when a chapter drops 🙂

Status: Ongoing!

Author's note: Remember, I'm still currently writing it, so I won't post regulary, it will probably be sporadic (as soon as I've finised writing a new chapter). But when a chapter teaser is posted, it means that chapter is dropping in the next week (or max two). I really hope you like it, please let me know 🙂

🍃 Chapter 1 Word count: 11,9K Summary: As exhaustion and stress threaten to consume you and your friends at work, Yoongi comes to the rescue with an enticing proposal: a collective vacation—a friendcation. Amid the backdrop of breathtaking landscapes and shared adventures, your feelings for him only deepens more. Yet, his lingering gaze holds secrets you can't ignore, leaving you to wonder if it conceals something deeper—an unspoken connection that may forever alter your friendship.

Read → the teaser Read → chapter one See → the moodboard

🍃Chapter 2 Word count: 12,7K Summary: When you get a flat tire, you think it’s bad luck, but when you fall flat on your ass and Yoongi offers to massage the pain away, has your luck finally turned? 😜

Read → the teaser Read → chapter two See → the moodboard

🍃Chapter 3 Word count: 11,9K Summary: When you and Yoongi visit his family in Daegu, and he introduces you as his friend, it rubs you all kind of wrong. But what are you even to each other, other than best friends with benefits?

Read → the teaser Read → chapter three See → the moodboard

🍃Chapter 4 Word count: 17,7K Summary: It’s the last weeks of the vacation being just you and Yoongi, and you’re going to savor every last bit of it. You do some hiking, relaxing and discover new sides to yourself that you didn’t know existed.

Read → the teaser Read → chapter four See → the moodboard

🍃Chapter 5 Word count: 23K Summary: Namjoon, Hoseok and Seokjin have finally joined you on your trip and it’s going great; you have a tremendous amount of fun (some at your expense), laughter and talks about life. Namjoon suddenly asks you where you think this thing with Yoongi is heading, and to be honest you don’t really know yourself – you just know that you love him.

Read → the teaser Read → chapter five See → the moodboard

🍃Chapter 6 [finale] Word count: TBA Summary: TBA

Read → the teaser Read → chapter six See → the moodboard

Author’s note: Thank you so much for reading! 🌸 I appreciate every like, comment and reblog, and please don’t be afraid to let me know what you think;  your kind words makes me extremely happy and motivated to keep writing and sharing more stories 💜

[moorswanderer]

it doesn’t matter. because in the end, this is all for him.

[thethunderthedragonfruit]

i was REALLY surprised i hadnt seen anyone animate over anything from the prevenge script reading yet, so i took matters into my own hands. i thought this bit was hilarious

audio from here

[inkskinned]

actually sometimes being neurodivergent is great bc you have a particular kind of Silly Mode that just . manifests glory. harmless fun is my precious side quest & i have a high score in whimsy. like okay if i gotta be the first dork in the dance pit it's gonna be me and this random toddler and we're gonna avril-style rock ouuuuttt

[viceandmature]

#Mood

[fateoas]