#But I'm making! Incremental! Progress!

[chicago-geniza]

Here is some ~personal progress~ to share with my personal blog. I have checked my email every day for 75 consecutive days despite overwhelming internal resistance. I have, more or less, kept up with correspondence. I have begun responding to text messages upon receipt rather than indefinitely deferring the task of reading and replying. I am the most avoidant person alive and it takes tremendous effort to repeat these actions every day until they become habitual. However as that post put it ACTION ABSORBS ANXIETY

[reactionimagesdaily]

Reaction images aside, how are you holding up?

Aww, thanks for asking. :P

To be honest, I'm probably doing better than most. I'm a healthy cishet white man who lives in the UK, so I don't have nearly as much to worry about as I know a lot of people do. (Also hey, I'm enjoying the new Dragon Age game, so that's been nice.) But I also know what kind of ramifications this election is bound to have, both inside the US and beyond.

(I mean, the world's biggest democracy is getting overtly more hostile and authoriarian in real time (y'know. again), and I know on this side of the pond we've got some real brain donors who'd love to see something similar happen here. I'm worried about what Trump could do once he's back in charge, and I'm worried about what might happen to my own country, with it's 'special relationship' to the US, as a result. And I'm not alone in that.

All this on a fuckin' Wednesday...)

Anyway, I had a longer thing written out here about the concept of orthopraxis (just while I was trying to get my thoughts in order, lmao) but the core of what I want to say is this:

I think we're about to see an uptick in people being shitty

I'm going to counter that by doing un-shitty things

What do I mean by un-shitty things? Well, I've been meaning to participate in Amnesty International's 'Write For Rights' campaign for months - I just fired off my first email today. I've already donated to causes supporting Gaza in the past, but now I'm also planning to write to my local MP about how annoyed I am that my country is still culpable in genocide. Make my voice heard, you know? I also want to keep making art that people enjoy, because I think that's important. And I'm going to buy another commission from an artist I like, because they could probably use something good in their life right now. And... to be honest, I'm not sure what else I'll do yet. When I figure it out, though, I'll try and actually do it.

Maybe for you, un-shitty things mean something smaller scale. Hugging your loved ones for longer, or giving that loose change you always carry around to the next homeless person you see. That's good too. Maybe it's something larger in scale, and that's awesome! But to anyone who's reading this, I'd definitely recommend doing something that not only feels good, but is also TANGIBLE. Not only does doing feel good, but it means that you're improving someone else's life, in however small a way. Which, y'know. Net positive, innit.

(Yes, I'm aware this is basically the 'when you see someone being so mean it inspires you to be kinder meme', lmao. No, I don't really care.)

You asked me how I'm holding up? Well, the first thing I'd like to do is respond to your question in kind: how are you holding up? In a general sense? In specific ways? Hopes, anxieties, plans?

And the next thing I'm going to do is tell you that I'm more than holding up.

I'm locking in.

[wiremotherofficial]

everyone is so afraid of blood that they forget sharp instruments cause significantly less damage. my experiment did 100% work but the "safer" alternative i tried was literally blunt force trauma to cause deliberate tissue damage rather than a minor incision lol

[karnalesbian]

ooghhh after a long fucking time I finally started working out with a trainer again now that my back isn't in the middle of an episode and i knew i was pretty out of shape compared to when i was younger but i severely underestimated the gap 😭

[sheliesshattered]

me: I’m going to get started on this project 7+ months before it needs to be done so that I can take my time and do things right, no cutting corners or feeling pressured to get it done faster

also me: but why is it taking so loooooonnnggggg ;_;

[pawsnifferpup]

Sometimes I think about how I play Magic The Gathering and what my favorite deck that I run is. I think about the fact that I run Dimir Control with a mill combo finisher. I control the board state through removal, I halt my opponent's progress through counter spells, and I can incrementally and also totally deplete my opponents library through mill. The point I'm trying to make is I love the ability to deny my opponent of anything that could bring them any amount of genuine satisfaction or pleasure in the game. In this post, I'm going to explain the eroticism of Magic the Gathering through the concept of denial, and I'll be trying to justify getting horny over fucking cardboard-

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Pluralistic: Leaving Twitter had no effect on NPR's traffic

I'm coming to Minneapolis! This Sunday (Oct 15): Presenting The Internet Con at Moon Palace Books. Monday (Oct 16): Keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.

Enshittification is the process by which a platform lures in and then captures end users (stage one), who serve as bait for business customers, who are also captured (stage two), whereupon the platform rug-pulls both groups and allocates all the value they generate and exchange to itself (stage three):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Enshittification isn't merely a form of rent-seeking – it is a uniquely digital phenomenon, because it relies on the inherent flexibility of digital systems. There are lots of intermediaries that want to extract surpluses from customers and suppliers – everyone from grocers to oil companies – but these can't be reconfigured in an eyeblink the that that purely digital services can.

A sleazy boss can hide their wage-theft with a bunch of confusing deductions to your paycheck. But when your boss is an app, it can engage in algorithmic wage discrimination, where your pay declines minutely every time you accept a job, but if you start to decline jobs, the app can raise the offer:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

I call this process "twiddling": tech platforms are equipped with a million knobs on their back-ends, and platform operators can endlessly twiddle those knobs, altering the business logic from moment to moment, turning the system into an endlessly shifting quagmire where neither users nor business customers can ever be sure whether they're getting a fair deal:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

Social media platforms are compulsive twiddlers. They use endless variation to lure in – and then lock in – publishers, with the goal of converting these standalone businesses into commodity suppliers who are dependent on the platform, who can then be charged rent to reach the users who asked to hear from them.

Facebook designed this playbook. First, it lured in end-users by promising them a good deal: "Unlike Myspace, which spies on you from asshole to appetite, Facebook is a privacy-respecting site that will never, ever spy on you. Simply sign up, tell us everyone who matters to you, and we'll populate a feed with everything they post for public consumption":

https://lawcat.berkeley.edu/record/1128876

The users came, and locked themselves in: when people gather in social spaces, they inadvertently take one another hostage. You joined Facebook because you liked the people who were there, then others joined because they liked you. Facebook can now make life worse for all of you without losing your business. You might hate Facebook, but you like each other, and the collective action problem of deciding when and whether to go, and where you should go next, is so difficult to overcome, that you all stay in a place that's getting progressively worse.

Once its users were locked in, Facebook turned to advertisers and said, "Remember when we told these rubes we'd never spy on them? It was a lie. We spy on them with every hour that God sends, and we'll sell you access to that data in the form of dirt-cheap targeted ads."

Then Facebook went to the publishers and said, "Remember when we told these suckers that we'd only show them the things they asked to see? Total lie. Post short excerpts from your content and links back to your websites and we'll nonconsensually cram them into the eyeballs of people who never asked to see them. It's a free, high-value traffic funnel for your own site, bringing monetizable users right to your door."

Now, Facebook had to find a way to lock in those publishers. To do this, it had to twiddle. By tiny increments, Facebook deprioritized publishers' content, forcing them to make their excerpts grew progressively longer. As with gig workers, the digital flexibility of Facebook gave it lots of leeway here. Some publishers sensed the excerpts they were being asked to post were a substitute for visiting their sites – and not an enticement – and drew down their posting to Facebook.

When that happened, Facebook could twiddle in the publisher's favor, giving them broader distribution for shorter excerpts, then, once the publisher returned to the platform, Facebook drew down their traffic unless they started posting longer pieces. Twiddling lets platforms play users and business-customers like a fish on a line, giving them slack when they fight, then reeling them in when they tire.

Once Facebook converted a publisher to a commodity supplier to the platform, it reeled the publishers in. First, it deprioritized publishers' posts when they had links back to the publisher's site (under the pretext of policing "clickbait" and "malicious links"). Then, it stopped showing publishers' content to their own subscribers, extorting them to pay to "boost" their posts in order to reach people who had explicitly asked to hear from them.

For users, this meant that their feeds were increasingly populated with payola-boosted content from advertisers and pay-to-play publishers who paid Facebook's Danegeld to reach them. A user will only spend so much time on Facebook, and every post that Facebook feeds that user from someone they want to hear from is a missed opportunity to show them a post from someone who'll pay to reach them.

Here, too, twiddling lets Facebook fine-tune its approach. If a user starts to wean themself off Facebook, the algorithm (TM) can put more content the user has asked to see in the feed. When the user's participation returns to higher levels, Facebook can draw down the share of desirable content again, replacing it with monetizable content. This is done minutely, behind the scenes, automatically, and quickly. In any shell game, the quickness of the hand deceives the eye.

This is the final stage of enshittification: withdrawing surpluses from end-users and business customers, leaving behind the minimum homeopathic quantum of value for each needed to keep them locked to the platform, generating value that can be extracted and diverted to platform shareholders.

But this is a brittle equilibrium to maintain. The difference between "God, I hate this place but I just can't leave it" and "Holy shit, this sucks, I'm outta here" is razor-thin. All it takes is one privacy scandal, one livestreamed mass-shooting, one whistleblower dump, and people bolt for the exits. This kicks off a death-spiral: as users and business customers leave, the platform's shareholders demand that they squeeze the remaining population harder to make up for the loss.

One reason this gambit worked so well is that it was a long con. Platform operators and their investors have been willing to throw away billions convincing end-users and business customers to lock themselves in until it was time for the pig-butchering to begin. They financed expensive forays into additional features and complementary products meant to increase user lock-in, raising the switching costs for users who were tempted to leave.

For example, Facebook's product manager for its "photos" product wrote to Mark Zuckerberg to lay out a strategy of enticing users into uploading valuable family photos to the platform in order to "make switching costs very high for users," who would have to throw away their precious memories as the price for leaving Facebook:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

The platforms' patience paid off. Their slow ratchets operated so subtly that we barely noticed the squeeze, and when we did, they relaxed the pressure until we were lulled back into complacency. Long cons require a lot of prefrontal cortex, the executive function to exercise patience and restraint.

Which brings me to Elon Musk, a man who seems to have been born without a prefrontal cortex, who has repeatedly and publicly demonstrated that he lacks any restraint, patience or planning. Elon Musk's prefrontal cortical deficit resulted in his being forced to buy Twitter, and his every action since has betrayed an even graver inability to stop tripping over his own dick.

Where Zuckerberg played enshittification as a long game, Musk is bent on speedrunning it. He doesn't slice his users up with a subtle scalpel, he hacks away at them with a hatchet.

Musk inaugurated his reign by nonconsensually flipping every user to an algorithmic feed which was crammed with ads and posts from "verified" users whose blue ticks verified solely that they had $8 ($11 for iOS users). Where Facebook deployed substantial effort to enticing users who tired of eyeball-cramming feed decay by temporarily improving their feeds, Musk's Twitter actually overrode users' choice to switch back to a chronological feed by repeatedly flipping them back to more monetizable, algorithmic feeds.

Then came the squeeze on publishers. Musk's Twitter rolled out a bewildering array of "verification" ticks, each priced higher than the last, and publishers who refused to pay found their subscribers taken hostage, with Twitter downranking or shadowbanning their content unless they paid.

(Musk also squeezed advertisers, keeping the same high prices but reducing the quality of the offer by killing programs that kept advertisers' content from being published along Holocaust denial and open calls for genocide.)

Today, Musk continues to squeeze advertisers, publishers and users, and his hamfisted enticements to make up for these depredations are spectacularly bad, and even illegal, like offering advertisers a new kind of ad that isn't associated with any Twitter account, can't be blocked, and is not labeled as an ad:

https://www.wired.com/story/xs-sneaky-new-ads-might-be-illegal/

Of course, Musk has a compulsive bullshitter's contempt for the press, so he has far fewer enticements for them to stay. Quite the reverse: first, Musk removed headlines from link previews, rendering posts by publishers that went to their own sites into stock-art enigmas that generated no traffic:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/oct/05/x-twitter-strips-headlines-new-links-why-elon-musk

Then he jumped straight to the end-stage of enshittification by announcing that he would shadowban any newsmedia posts with links to sites other than Twitter, "because there is less time spent if people click away." Publishers were advised to "post content in long form on this platform":

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/111183068362793821

Where a canny enshittifier would have gestured at a gaslighting explanation ("we're shadowbanning posts with links because they might be malicious"), Musk busts out the motto of the Darth Vader MBA: "I am altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further."

All this has the effect of highlighting just how little residual value there is on the platform for publishers, and tempts them to bolt for the exits. Six months ago, NPR lost all patience with Musk's shenanigans, and quit the service. Half a year later, they've revealed how low the switching cost for a major news outlet that leaves Twitter really are: NPR's traffic, post-Twitter, has declined by less than a single percentage point:

https://niemanreports.org/articles/npr-twitter-musk/

NPR's Twitter accounts had 8.7 million followers, but even six months ago, Musk's enshittification speedrun had drawn down NPR's ability to reach those users to a negligible level. The 8.7 million number was an illusion, a shell game Musk played on publishers like NPR in a bid to get them to buy a five-figure iridium checkmark or even a six-figure titanium one.

On Twitter, the true number of followers you have is effectively zero – not because Twitter users haven't explicitly instructed the service to show them your posts, but because every post in their feeds that they want to see is a post that no one can be charged to show them.

I've experienced this myself. Three and a half years ago, I left Boing Boing and started pluralistic.net, my cross-platform, open access, surveillance-free, daily newsletter and blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/drei-drei-drei/#now-we-are-three

Boing Boing had the good fortune to have attracted a sizable audience before the advent of siloed platforms, and a large portion of that audience came to the site directly, rather than following us on social media. I knew that, starting a new platform from scratch, I wouldn't have that luxury. My audience would come from social media, and it would be up to me to convert readers into people who followed me on platforms I controlled – where neither they nor I could be held to ransom.

I embraced a strategy called POSSE: Post Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere. With POSSE, the permalink and native habitat for your material is a site you control (in my case, a WordPress blog with all the telemetry, logging and surveillance disabled). Then you repost that content to other platforms – mostly social media – with links back to your own site:

https://indieweb.org/POSSE

There are a lot of automated tools to help you with this, but the platforms have gone to great lengths to break or neuter them. Musk's attack on Twitter's legendarily flexible and powerful API killed every automation tool that might help with this. I was lucky enough to have a reader – Loren Kohnfelder – who coded me some python scripts that automate much of the process, but POSSE remains a very labor-intensive and error-prone methodology:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/13/two-decades/#hfbd

And of all the feeds I produce – email, RSS, Discourse, Medium, Tumblr, Mastodon – none is as labor-intensive as Twitter's. It is an unforgiving medium to begin with, and Musk's drawdown of engineering support has made it wildly unreliable. Many's the time I've set up 20+ posts in a thread, only to have the browser tab reload itself and wipe out all my work.

But I stuck with Twitter, because I have a half-million followers, and to the extent that I reach them there, I can hope that they will follow the permalinks to Pluralistic proper and switch over to RSS, or email, or a daily visit to the blog.

But with each day, the case for using Twitter grows weaker. I get ten times as many replies and reposts on Mastodon, though my Mastodon follower count is a tenth the size of my (increasingly hypothetical) Twitter audience.

All this raises the question of what can or should be done about Twitter. One possible regulatory response would be to impose an "End-To-End" rule on the service, requiring that Twitter deliver posts from willing senders to willing receivers without interfering in them. End-To-end is the bedrock of the internet (one of its incarnations is Net Neutrality) and it's a proven counterenshittificatory force:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-need-end-end-web

Despite what you may have heard, "freedom of reach" is freedom of speech: when a platform interposes itself between willing speakers and their willing audiences, it arrogates to itself the power to control what we're allowed to say and who is allowed to hear us:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

We have a wide variety of tools to make a rule like this stick. For one thing, Musk's Twitter has violated innumerable laws and consent decrees in the US, Canada and the EU, which creates a space for regulators to impose "conduct remedies" on the company.

But there's also existing regulatory authorities, like the FTC's Section Five powers, which enable the agency to act against companies that engage in "unfair and deceptive" acts. When Twitter asks you who you want to hear from, then refuses to deliver their posts to you unless they pay a bribe, that's both "unfair and deceptive":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

But that's only a stopgap. The problem with Twitter isn't that this important service is run by the wrong mercurial, mediocre billionaire: it's that hundreds of millions of people are at the mercy of any foolish corporate leader. While there's a short-term case for improving the platforms, our long-term strategy should be evacuating them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/18/urban-wildlife-interface/#combustible-walled-gardens

To make that a reality, we could also impose a "Right To Exit" on the platforms. This would be an interoperability rule that would require Twitter to adopt Mastodon's approach to server-hopping: click a link to export the list of everyone who follows you on one server, click another link to upload that file to another server, and all your followers and followees are relocated to your new digs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/23/semipermeable-membranes/#free-as-in-puppies

A Twitter with the Right To Exit would exert a powerful discipline even on the stunted self-regulatory centers of Elon Musk's brain. If he banned a reporter for publishing truthful coverage that cast him in a bad light, that reporter would have the legal right to move to another platform, and continue to reach the people who follow them on Twitter. Publishers aghast at having the headlines removed from their Twitter posts could go somewhere less slipshod and still reach the people who want to hear from them on Twitter.

And both Right To Exit and End-To-End satisfy the two prime tests for sound internet regulation: first, they are easy to administer. If you want to know whether Musk is permitting harassment on his platform, you have to agree on a definition of harassment, determine whether a given act meets that definition, and then investigate whether Twitter took reasonable steps to prevent it.

By contrast, administering End-To-End merely requires that you post something and see if your followers receive it. Administering Right To Exit is as simple as saying, "OK, Twitter, I know you say you gave Cory his follower and followee file, but he says he never got it. Just send him another copy, and this time, CC the regulator so we can verify that it arrived."

Beyond administration, there's the cost of compliance. Requiring Twitter to police its users' conduct also requires it to hire an army of moderators – something that Elon Musk might be able to afford, but community-supported, small federated servers couldn't. A tech regulation can easily become a barrier to entry, blocking better competitors who might replace the company whose conduct spurred the regulation in the first place.

End-to-End does not present this kind of barrier. The default state for a social media platform is to deliver posts from accounts to their followers. Interfering with End-To-End costs more than delivering the messages users want to have. Likewise, a Right To Exit is a solved problem, built into the open Mastodon protocol, itself built atop the open ActivityPub standard.

It's not just Twitter. Every platform is consuming itself in an orgy of enshittification. This is the Great Enshittening, a moment of universal, end-stage platform decay. As the platforms burn, calls to address the fires grow louder and harder for policymakers to resist. But not all solutions to platform decay are created equal. Some solutions will perversely enshrine the dominance of platforms, help make them both too big to fail and too big to jail.

Musk has flagrantly violated so many rules, laws and consent decrees that he has accidentally turned Twitter into the perfect starting point for a program of platform reform and platform evacuation.

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/2023/10/14/freedom-of-reach/#ex

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

Image: JD Lasica (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elon_Musk_%283018710552%29.jpg

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

[mariowritesforyou]

Make your margins wider in your writing

Writing what feels like a dozen pages only to figure out after that you haven't even gotten through half a page is a universal experience across all writers.

What I'm about to tell you is one way I've found helps getting through that psychological toll.

One day I was writing my novel (a-luchador-detective-versus-a-lady-vampire sort of affair) when I got a certain idea. I picked up my copy of Authority by Jeff Vandermeer that I had on the desk and decided to make the line length in my work the same as that paperback edition. Margins were widened and line spacing was adjusted, leaving me with a sort of narrow manuscript.

You've no idea how much my productivity went up.

Logically, finishing a line became much faster, which lead to quicker finished pages, which produced a longer-looking manuscript. Of course, this doesn't mean that my writing was immediately faster per se,

but the feeling of being faster placebo-ed me in a way that increased my output.

Now I'm hitting my daily word-count much more consistently and I believe this was partly responsible.

Humans like numbers going up, if we wouldn't both videogames and billionares wouldn't exist. Seeing my page count increase is a reward to my brain which gives me a boost to get to the next page. By decreasing the length between rewards I'm put in a more constant progression loop, no longer feeling the slog of going up a hill and being met with a thousand more.

And at the end, if I want to check my actual progress, the real gauge will forever be the total word count, which we shouldn't obsess over, anyways.

The journey to create a novel or other piece of long-form media will always be more of a marathon than a race, and should be undertaken with the mindset of a marathon. All progress is incremental, and you should not be emotionally punishing yourself for not finishing a quarter of your book in the last week, as if that were somehow possible.

The length of a novel is such that any time-saving and efficiency-increasing life hacks we apply would only be reducing our-time-finish by weeks at the most, so why the rush?

I believe the key to writing faster is to write constantly first.

Can't be fast without stamina. So go ahead; write and make writing easier on you.

[fiveht]

Proof of life (Adore pt 3)

Hello my sweet angel babies ♥️

I'm not going to be able to adequately express my gratitude for the steady stream of love (and concern, sorry) I've been receiving over the past couple of months. I'm so sorry I've been AWOL, it will definitely happen again. Because see, for me, I usually have to make a choice between social and creative fandom participation. My battery is small, and takes a long time to charge.

Thank you to everyone who's left comments and asks and DMs since I've been gone. I don't think I can respond to all of it, but rest assured those messages ping my cold, dead heart every time I see them.

So I'm gonna go out on a limb here. I did this same thing months and months ago, when I was working on Head Over Feet, and let me be clear: posting even a single word of a WIP goes against my every instinct and principle as an author. I am someone who likes to finish an entire story before I post any of it, and on top of that, I am NOT a fast writer, so the expectations that I'm setting up here might not be advisable. But I did it before and managed to finish the thing, and I want to give you guys something in exchange for being so unbelievably awesome, so here I am again.

This will probably be the only time I mention this story in public until it's finished and posted, and inquiries about my progress are unlikely to help with the writing process, I'm just saying. I reserve the right to change every last word of this before the final draft, and I also reserve the right to fall off the face of the planet and simply never finish it, as much as I will strive to prevent that from happening. Please be patient with me.

Anyway, here is my paltry offering to say thanks for the love: the (VERY rough) first ~1300 words of the third instalment of The Adventures of Soft Daddy and Danger Twink.

Sirius secures his handheld shower head to its holder at the edge of his clawfoot tub, and steps out carefully onto the bathmat. He shivers in the cool air outside the shower curtain; it's about twenty degrees below zero outside, so even if he could afford to run his ancient radiator at full blast, it probably wouldn't help much.

He dries himself off and checks his reflection in the mirror, turning his face this way and that as he tugs his hair out of the bun he'd piled it into to keep it dry during his shower. There's no need for makeup tonight, not when he's not even planning to put on clothes.

It's incrementally warmer when he steps out into the main room of his apartment. He gathers an array of splayed text books and notes from his bed and dumps them carelessly onto the couch, then closes his new laptop and places it delicately on the coffee table. It's the most expensive thing he owns, save for the Gucci backpack currently sitting in his wardrobe with a three-inch berth around it like his shoes and other bags might somehow contaminate it. It's weird owning rich-people stuff when you are still, objectively, broke as fuck.

He perches on the edge of his bed and sets his phone to charge, because his battery doesn't even last a day anymore, and he's going to need it this evening. He tucks it in next to his pillow and picks up his new toy.

The plug isn't much larger than the one he already has. A little longer, which is appealing, but no wider, so it shouldn't be a challenge to get it in comfortably. He disconnects it from its charger and hefts it in his hand, feeling the added weight from the electronics inside.

He picks up his phone, and hesitates when he sees the notification waiting for him.

Rieka: let's go out tomorrow

Rieka: the fact that we haven't been drunk since the term started is criminal

Rieka: we've had two chem labs and zero drinks

Sirius purses his lips, thumbs hovering over the keyboard. There's a fine line here, and he hasn't quite found it yet.

Me: got plans

Me: raincheck?

So complete avoidance is the best strategy, right?

Rieka: booooo 👎

He sighs, but at least she's not asking for an explanation. He opens a different conversation then, pushing all thoughts of Rieka Lupin into a tidy, sealed compartment, not to be opened during certain activities with a certain relative of hers.

Me: i'm ready

Me: are you in your office?

Daddy: Yup, I've got a few minutes

Daddy: Want me to call?

Instead of answering, Sirius hits the call button himself.

"Hey baby," Remus answers. His voice is already smooth and honey-sweet, and just from that, Sirius knows he's planning to lay it on thick tonight.

"Hi daddy," Sirius says with a smile. "Should I put it in now?"

There's a low chuckle over the line. "Are we feeling eager?"

"Always," Sirius says, laying back on his bed.

"Use the good lube I got you, it's gonna be in there a while."

He switches the call to speaker, and snags the bottle from his nightstand. "I threw out the old stuff, you've got me ruined for cheap lube."

"Only the best for that ass," Remus says, and Sirius can hear his smirk.

He gives the plug a liberal coating, running his fingers along its shape, his dick twitching just at the feel of the silky-smooth silicone, at the anticipation of what's about to happen. He spreads his legs wide, drawing one knee up to give himself easier access.

"Take it slow," Remus says, succinctly heading off Sirius' impulse to just shove the thing inside himself in one go. "Rub the tip against yourself, so you're nice and wet."

Sirius shuts his eyes as he obeys, sliding the slick end of the toy over his entrance. "Okay."

"Are you going to be a good boy for daddy tonight?"

"Uh-huh," Sirius says, teasing the very tip of the plug in and out of his hole.

"Tell me how."

"I'm not gonna touch."

"You're not gonna touch, and you're not gonna come."

"Yeah," Sirius says. His cock is starting to harden as his body tries to draw the plug inside. "Can I put it in, daddy?"

"Slow," Remus reminds him, "Slide it in nice and slow for me, baby."

Sirius catches his lip between his teeth and tries to push the plug in slowly, the way he knows Remus would do if he was here. 

The shower has left him relaxed and more than ready, and it's hard not to take advantage, just press the toy in to its limit because he can. But he's working on his patience -- under Remus' careful tutelage -- so he shuts his eyes and tries to savour it, the tease of the plug's rubber tip at his entrance, the slow stretch as he eases it past the slight resistance before he sighs, and his body eagerly accepts the intrusion.

"Mmmm," Sirius sighs as he settles the base of the plug flush against his entrance, shifting his hips and feeling the constant, dull pressure against his prostate.

"How's it feel?" 

"Good," Sirius says, splaying his legs out and just enjoying the pleasant fullness. It's been almost a week since Remus last fucked him, and that's just way too long. Christmas really spoiled him. He tugs the blankets up around him, because it's going to take some time before his body temperature is high enough to fight against the chill in his apartment.

"Have you tried out the settings at all?" Remus asks him, and Sirius picks up the phone, switching off speaker and holding it to his ear.

"No," he says, grinding his ass down against the bed to test the plug's reach inside him. "I thought you'd rather do the honours."

Remus hums, and Sirius hears the phone shifting in his grip. "I'm gonna turn it on, okay? Lowest setting."

"O--" Sirius stutters as the plug buzzes to life inside him, nestled snug against his prostate and sending little zings of pleasure down his legs. "Fuck that feels good. That's the lowest setting?"

"It is," Remus confirms. "Want to run through them all, see how high it goes? Or would you rather be surprised?"

"Mmmm, surprise me."

"Surprise it is," Remus says, and Sirius hears shuffling papers in the background as he prepares for his night class. Psychology 1001, Thursdays, 7-9:30PM. Two and a half hours of a lecture that Remus swears he's given so many times he could recite it in his sleep, so why not give himself something fun to focus on while he goes through the motions? 

Being privy to all of this brilliant, upstanding man's secret perversions is a privilege Sirius does not take lightly.

"You can turn it off from the app if you need to," Remus is saying, "Or you can call me and I'll switch it off. My phone's on vibrate, so I'll see it right away."

Sirius smiles to himself. "Got it," he says, though this is a rehashing of the rules that Remus had laid out when he'd brought the plug over last weekend. He'd called it a "late Christmas gift", as if he hadn't already given Sirius several thousand dollars worth of presents on Christmas morning.

There's more rustling over the line, the squeak of a chair. 

"Tell me again how you're going to be good tonight."

"I'm not gonna touch myself, and I'm not gonna come." The toy is still buzzing away inside him, making everything a little fuzzy at the edges. 

"Tell me why."

"'Cause daddy's in charge, even when he's not here."

"Good boy."

Sirius squirms with pleasure, his cock smearing a little drop of fluid on his belly as the toy hums insistently at his prostate.

"I have to head out," Remus says. "How do you feel?"

"Good," Sirius says, his abs tensing as he shifts his legs and the angle of the toy changes. "Excited."

"Me too," Remus says softly. "I'll talk to you soon, beautiful. Send me some pictures." With a low beep, the call disconnects.

[thejockout]

New File Time! Lifting is Leisure

Alriiiight. Gotta be honest folks, I did have to produce and upload this one in a hurry; I have completed my writing + recording output for 2024 but as of writing this, I have yet to produce/upload them all. This is the first one in the "crunch", so hopefully I'm better prepped for the rest to come.

This file was actually, I believe, born out of a conversation with Avis Sapiens where he used this phrase with me to defend himself lifting on one of his rare days off. He called lifting leisure, and I kinda laughed at the time because it was so muscle-pilled of him, but it also made me think about how lifting can be reframed/enjoyed by so many in different ways.

This file therefore seeks to help YOU reframe lifting the same way. To tie the incremental progress made in each workout to an incremental experience of the pleasure, triumph, success, arousal, or whatever else you believe lies at the end of your bodybuilding journey. It will be of benefit to you if you're seeking to make lifting a habit but haven't quiiite found the momentum yet, OR if you already lift dilligently but just want to enjoy it more. It's a myth that exercise has to be a slog; and in this trance, I'm going to bust it.

(As a final bit of housekeeping, you might notice that there are two versions of this file attached at the bottom of the post, Complex and Simple. Complex is "as Jockout intends" with backing tracks and whispers, a new production element I'm including. Simple is stripped down, just my voice and a binaural/rain sounds. Let me know if you have feedback on the new backing elements.)

CONTENT WARNINGS:

Honestly if you read the description, there is nothing else to add. No real trigger work here besides very soft "you drop for my voice/finger snaps" work at the beginning of the file, and POSSIBLY "soft" trigger work with the gym/weightlifting triggering positive feelings in you.

WARNING: THIS WILL MAKE YOU HUGE?

WARNING: THIS IS GONNA BE A FUN TIME?

WARNING: BRO YOU'RE GONNA GET SO SWOLE

--------------------------------------------------------- https://linktr.ee/jockout When I'm not dropping myself or others, I'm off being a mystical forest bro in the wilderness of Ireland. But I am always available for commissions if you reach out via DM. My flat rate is currently $65-100, but you can check my pinned Tumblr post for more up-to-date info. Keep listening, bros.

[improbable-implosions]

Another multi-parter for both thighs across the main seam of a pair of jeans! This is a VERY common canvas for sashiko 'round this household, seeing as both Razz and I have pretty thorough thighs. Luckily, having learned my lesson (somewhat) from the giant patches in the same area I did previously, I split this into two designs, even if the patch fabric itself was one piece. Both designs are from wrenbirdart's stick and stitch collections, barring that little section on the first one I pencilled myself, as the main pattern was slightly too small.

First up we've got this genuinely delightful set of little asterisks, formed out of vertical, horizontal, and two diagonal sets of stitches. The first set of stitches immediately make clear that I really should be more careful about my math when I'm trying to duplicate the wrenbirdarts patterns onto my own dissolvable backing. Sure, that set all the way on the right is off by increasing increments of a quarter inch with each set, but I actually don't mind that look too badly in the end. The general look of all the eight-pointed overlapping crosses works super well, and I may take some inspiration from the mildly-fumbled pattern on that hand-pencilled section to make an alternating pattern of standard crosses and the asterisks, in the future.

Secondly, there's this pine forest design! I really had a love hate relationship with this one, as the pattern itself is SUPER pretty, I mean, look at that final picture! It's so beautiful! The major downside, though, is that it doesn't lend a lot of opportunities to load up straight stitches in a row. As you can kinda see in the progress shots, you do that central "coordinate grid" of a given pine top, then go quarter by quarter, filling in the other stitches, one by one, individually. Which, to me, is SUPER boring, I much prefer to load up a bunch of straight stitches in a row, then pull them all through, smoothing the fabric afterwards. So, partially because I wanted to get it done and over with as fast as possible, and partially because my jean shorts were in DIRE need of fast repairs before I could wear them in the (then incoming) summer heat, I somewhat sped my way through the pattern, in hopes that I can later come back to this pattern, and develop a more-loadable version that still keeps the pine-like beauty of the finished piece here.

[tearlessrain]

I'm so tired of performative social justice that doesn't actually do anything. stop worshiping the concept of a glorious revolution that will fix everything and make an actionable plan while you push for incremental local change. trump winning isn't going to kickstart some YA novel bullshit and save the day it will destroy us and kill any chance we had of stopping the genocide you're claiming to care about so much. just swallow your pride and fucking vote so we have a chance in hell to work toward a better world and achieve any degree of progress/harm reduction. for fucks sake.

[boreal-sea]

Something I don’t see people discussing properly on tumblr is how progress happens. I don’t mean the mechanics, I mean the overall momentum.

I’m going to use geology here for a moment. For a long time there were two schools of thought about geologic processes: catastrophism and uniformitarianism. The first posits that all major geologic change happens in sudden and catastrophic moments. Volcanoes suddenly appear, landslides occur, earthquakes tear apart the ground. Uniformitarianism instead states that all geologic change is slow and constant. Mountains erode over millions of years, tectonic plates move only centimeters per year, rivers carve out a course over thousands of years.

Now, even a non-geologist can look at this and correctly observe that in fact BOTH of these types events happen. Volcanoes and erosion exist side by side. And geologists agree. Today it’s accepted that much of geologic history is typified by long slow processes interspersed with rare moments of catastrophe.

And social change is a lot like geology. It feels like a lot of people fall into catastrophism or uniformitarianism and these two groups are at odds with one another. Catastrophists in particular are extremely frustrated with the slow periods of social change. Uniformitarianists tend to be wary of the "burn it all down" crowd, citing the harm that would do to vulnerable groups.

But social change does in fact move at two paces. It tends to plod along, with groups slowly gaining rights over decades. One small law here, another there. When you look back over the course of 50 years you can see significant change! But in the moment, it feels like nothing is happening at all. However, there are moments where there is significant and sudden change. The Civil War is one example. Brown v. Board of Education is another example.

And like nature, these watershed moments, these leaps forward for human rights, are usually the result of a culmination of social pressure, of the slow incremental change that happened in the decades prior. The Civil War didn't come out of nowhere. Neither did Brown v. Board of Education. These moments of upheaval need the work of the slow and steady folks.

Again, to use geology, I think about it like how earthquakes work. An earthquake does not (usually) come out of nowhere. It is instead the result of pressure building up between two tectonic plates. This pressure finally becomes too much, the friction between the plates is overcome by the shear force, and the plates violently lurch. In some places, there are lots of little earthquakes: it doesn't take much force to cause the plates to slip, and the resulting earthquakes aren't very big. In other locations though, pressure has been building for a very long time. When that pressure is released the earthquake is massive.

A lot of people who comment angrily on my posts begging them to vote for the Democrats are catastrophists. They want change NOW. They are tired of the slow and steady work. But I think Roe v. Wade being overturned is an important lesson in how sometimes, those catastrophic moments don't always have staying power, especially if other slow behind-the-scenes progress is not done to enshrine those rights -- and with regards to abortion, the blame is entire on the Democrats. They failed to enshrine those protections into federal law, and instead simply assumed Roe v. Wade would never be overturned.

I'm not against sudden progress, but I do not think it's something you can artificially manufacture. You cannot intentionally make this volcano explode, you cannot trigger an earthquake on purpose. To borrow something from a Folding Ideas video (In Search of a Flat Earth), it seems as though some of these people are attempting to manufacture the circumstances needed to bring about catastrophic change through any means necessary, including allowing Trump to become president again. The harm this may cause is irrelevant; the ends justify the means to these people.

So when I propose we stay the course, vote Democrat, and continue to push for ranked-choice voting, the catastrophists see this as paramount to agreeing to everything the current system is doing. I don't want everything to change right now, so clearly that means I must completely agree with, enjoy, and benefit from the system as-is. This of course could not be further from the truth. I actually want society to change almost completely. I want election reform, I want us to stop being capitalists, I want bigotry to fade into a distant memory, I want us to do everything we can to fix global warming and pollution. The idea world I imagine is very different from the world we currently live in.

I do think another catastrophic lurch forward will happen. I don't know what it will look like. It will probably be the culmination of many years of effort. Maybe it will be an election many years from now in which every state uses ranked-choice voting and a 3rd party candidate actually wins. Maybe it will be something that happens tomorrow. Biden could pass away, leaving Harris to take his place as the nominee. That might seem like it's not the result of decades of effort, but Harris even being in the White House is a result of slow effort.

[qqueenofhades]

Do you think part of what makes people feel like voting isn’t worth it because things don’t get better under democrats is because we can’t see what would have happened? Like I see a lot of people saying “well biden hasn’t made america much better so there’s no point” but it’s like they don’t understand that under a republican they would actively do everything they could to cause more harm. It’s like they don’t understand that 1. The president can’t do much, and 2. IT WOULD BE WORSE. like they don’t understand the possibilities. Idk people just frustrate me

I'm sorry, as I know you're just relaying what these people think and not claiming so yourself, but the whole "things don't get better under Biden/Democrats" line to which we are subjected so very, miserably often is a lie!!! It is demonstrably a lie! It is peddled by people who deliberately live in their echo-chamber leftist misinformation bubbles and either don't read the news, don't accept anything less than the Magical Socialist Revolution Now, and don't think partial or incremental progress (aka the only kind of progress that exists) is valid. "Biden hasn't single-handedly fixed everything wrong with America and the world after the most damaging presidency ever to exist and 250+ years of flaws, while other countries actually are their own actors with agency making complex choices, so we shouldn't vote for him" is a bullshit lie and I'm tired of it!!!

(Again. Sorry. This is not directed at you. This is just my frustration with this entire ridiculous situation speaking.)

We have had multiple elections now where people voted for Democrats, which resulted in abortion protections, protections for LGBTQ people, the biggest climate legislation ever to pass Congress/be signed into law (the Inflation Reduction Act), vast improvements in the job market, executive actions both large and small, improvements in labor and the economy, a general democratic system, a defense of the rule of law, a warning against fascism, and everything else that Trump trampled on in 4 years and will finish the job of doing if this godforsaken country is either right-wing-zealot or left-wing-zealot enough to put him back into office. (Like, people. Google is free. You're welcome to look up the improvements Biden has actually made, but that would harm your Narrative.) So much of this misinformation is also peddled by people who are proud that they don't have a clue how the American government works and/or deliberately lie about it: see all the claims that it was Biden's fault for not magically stopping a Trump-stacked SCOTUS, selected for the express purpose of overturning Roe, from overturning Roe. Because the president could just unilaterally overturn the Supreme Court with no problems at all if He Really Wanted To, I guess. Even if that is literally not the way it has ever functioned in history.

All the noxious Republicans in state legislatures passing anti-trans/anti-abortion/anti-voting laws ARE NOT SOMETHING BIDEN CAN STOP. If you're going to criticize him for not doing something, for God's sake at least make it for something he can do (like not calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, though I would argue he's already taking a more nuanced approach than the entirety of the American establishment during the War on Terror). And then vote for him when/if he follows it up, not just throw your hands in the air and scream about how you Can't Possibly Sully Yourself (especially when there is some very selective support going on here and a deliberate white-washing of how many orders of magnitude worse absolutely everything else in America and the world would be under Trump. So.)

I'm tired of it. I'm really, really tired of it. I've been trying to cut back on my politics posting because my mental health is bad right now and I often feel like a broken record screaming into the void. But. Yeah. Anyway. Whoof.

[chaifootsteps]

ghostfuckers anon - I think the other thing I'm not looking forward to about the next ep is that (assuming the storyboards are mostly accurate) the ghost repeating that Blitzo hates himself is just a waste

we already know that. it's been very well established at this point

what's the point of this episode if they don't progress the characters, even incrementally?

the storyboards have Blitzo asked M&M if they really like hanging out with him and they're all "sure, whatever" but basically nothing has happened all season to show the bonds between IMP getting stronger. Blitzo and Loona's relationship is as tense as ever, they have this big storybeat in seeing stars then she basically isn't a character for the rest of the season until full moon. then the ghostfuckers storyboards has Blitzo admit he knows she doesn't actually like him like it's just nbd, we just move on from it?

saying it's a cost saving measure isn't an excuse imo - they had the money to animate a full mv of Stolas singing about how sad he is Blitz doesn't love him. we already know this is the case! he sings about it constantly! running out of money to pay Loona's VA to have any moments between her and Blitz isn't a money issue, it's a prioritization issue

Viv is actively wasting what money still remains to even make this show on the wrong things. I know the comparison to RWBY has been made more than once with the handling of the Faunus subplot but it also has in common with the RWBY writers that they do not know how to spend their time. and both of them waste time on creator's pets who suck up screentime while making things worse (but at least RWBY's author inserts weren't such sucky people that they sexually coerced any of the main cast and then cried about it)

She's putting every last dollar and second of screentime towards furthering Stolitz. It's Verbalase levels of self-indulgent, and at least he was honest about it.

Also, between Apology Tour and the Ghostfuckers leak, the "Blitzo hates himself" plot point has officially reached levels of uncomfortable. The message seems to be that he's just sort of inherently awful, that anyone who's ever cared about him was wrong to do it, that people are right to tell him to kill himself, and that he'd better wise up and let his sexual abuser love him, because no one else ever will.

[doberbutts]

Am I wrong to be glad that black and brown people running for high office is just like normal now? Back in 2008 (now i was a wee lad back then so i'm going more off others' analysis) the question was "can we even elect a black person?" and in 2016 it was "can we elect a woman?" (i just wish it wasn't that woman), but now the general population don't, like, seem to be asking those questions about Harris on any sort of a wide scale? even with my hangups with her, and of course people are still being racist to and about her, and the birtherism president is still running, but this seems like huge progress to me, am I wrong?

Yes, we are making progress in incremental steps, even if internet doomerism and extremism tells you we are not.

I have voiced many concerns over how extreme people's politics are getting and how dangerous I think it is, but I am at least glad to live in a world where more than straight white men can run and it's no longer seen as a shock.