#Code Reviews in Development Teams

[jcmarchi]

How AI is Redefining Team Dynamics in Collaborative Software Development

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How AI is Redefining Team Dynamics in Collaborative Software Development

While artificial intelligence is transforming various industries worldwide, its impact on software development is especially significant. AI-powered tools are enhancing code quality and efficiency and redefining how teams work together in collaborative environments. As AI continues to evolve, it’s becoming a key player in reconfiguring team dynamics, enhancing productivity, and streamlining communication. This article explores how AI redefines team dynamics in collaborative software development, unlocking new ways of working and shaping the industry’s future.

The Shift to AI-Augmented Development

In the past, software development relied heavily on human expertise at every stage, from design and coding to testing and deployment. While this traditional approach has driven significant progress, it faces bottlenecks, including inefficiencies, communication barriers, and human errors. Recent advancements in AI, however, are offering intelligent solutions that effectively address these challenges, transforming how development teams operate.

AI-augmented development redefines team collaboration by automating routine tasks such as bug detection, code reviews, and version control. By handling these repetitive tasks, AI allows developers to focus on more complex, higher-order problems, improving their productivity and efficiency. This automation also promotes effective collaboration by minimizing bottlenecks and reducing the need for constant manual intervention.

In addition, AI-powered tools like GitHub Copilot and DeepCode are helping developers to write code cleaner and faster. These tools provide real-time suggestions, enabling teams to maintain consistent coding standards across multiple developers. This reduces team friction and creates a more harmonious work environment, enabling junior developers to work independently while following best practices.

Enhancing Cross-Functional Collaboration

AI’s impact goes beyond just coding; it’s becoming vital for enhancing collaboration among teams, especially in agile development environments. Software development relies heavily on teamwork, shifting responsibilities between developers, testers, product managers, and business users. These teams must interact and communicate effectively to achieve their shared goals. AI tools are helping to break down the traditional silos that often get in the way of effective communication.

For instance, AI-driven project management platforms like Asana and Jira optimize task allocation by analyzing team performance and identifying skill gaps. These platforms predict potential roadblocks and suggest workflows that ensure tasks are assigned to the most appropriate team members, improving project outcomes. AI also assists in forecasting timelines, reducing project delays, and providing data-driven insights that help team leaders make more informed decisions.

Furthermore, AI’s natural language processing (NLP) capabilities enable more effective communication between technical and non-technical team members. AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants can now interpret technical jargon and translate it into language that product managers or clients can understand. This communication mechanism creates a more inclusive team environment where everyone is on the same page, regardless of their technical expertise.

Boosting Remote and Distributed Teams

In today’s globalized world, remote work has become the norm for many software development teams. Distributed teams often face challenges related to communication, coordination, and maintaining productivity across time zones. AI is crucial in bridging these gaps and ensuring that remote teams remain as effective as co-located ones.

AI-powered collaboration tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams incorporate features that help manage distributed workforces. These platforms utilize AI to analyze communication patterns, flag potential miscommunications, and suggest the best meeting times based on team members’ availability across different time zones.

Additionally, AI is transforming code review processes for remote teams. Tools like Codacy and CodeClimate use machine learning algorithms to automate code reviews, ensuring that teams follow best practices even when senior developers are not immediately available for oversight. This mechanism accelerates the review process and maintains consistency in code quality merged into the project.

AI also helps maintain team bonding in a remote setting. AI-powered sentiment analysis tools can monitor communication channels, identifying signs of burnout or disengagement among team members. These insights allow managers to intervene early and provide support, ensuring remote teams remain motivated and productive.

AI and Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)

One of the most significant shifts AI drives in team dynamics is in continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). AI-powered tools enhance CI/CD pipelines by automating various aspects of the software development lifecycle, from testing to deployment.

Traditionally, teams invested significant manual effort in managing CI/CD pipelines to ensure they tested, integrated, and deployed code changes without disrupting the system. However, AI automates these processes, allowing teams to implement changes more frequently and confidently. Tools like CircleCI and Jenkins now integrate AI algorithms that predict the success of builds, identify failure points, and optimize deployment strategies.

AI-driven CI/CD fosters better collaboration among developers and operations teams (DevOps). By automating routine deployment tasks, AI allows DevOps teams to focus on strategic improvements and infrastructure scalability instead of constantly dealing with deployment issues. This enhances the synergy between development and operations teams, creating a more cohesive workflow that aligns with the project’s broader goals.

Democratizing Software Development

As AI increasingly integrates into collaborative development environments, software development becomes more accessible to everyone. AI-powered low-code and no-code platforms are allowing non-developers to contribute to software projects in ways that were previously impossible.

Platforms like OutSystems and Appian use AI to guide users through the software development process, enabling business analysts, project managers, and clients to create functional applications without extensive coding expertise. This democratization shifts the traditional dynamic of software teams, where developers are the sole gatekeepers of technical knowledge. Now, diverse teams can actively participate in the development process, contributing to innovation and bringing new perspectives.

These developments have also led to the rise of “citizen developers,” who can quickly prototype ideas, test them, and iterate without relying on professional developers for every process step. This evolution speeds up the innovation cycle and allows software development teams to focus on refining and scaling ideas rather than being bogged down by the initial stages of development.

AI as a Team Member: The Rise of AI Pair Programming

One of the most fascinating developments in AI-assisted software development is the concept of AI as a virtual team member. AI pair programming, where a human developer collaborates with an AI tool to write and review code, is gaining traction. GitHub Copilot, for example, uses OpenAI’s Codex model to assist developers by suggesting code completions, functions, and entire blocks of code based on context.

AI pair programming tools are not just passive assistants; they actively participate in the development process by learning from past codebases and user interactions to provide increasingly accurate suggestions. This evolution fundamentally changes how developers interact with their work, reducing cognitive load and allowing them to focus on more complex, creative tasks.

AI is changing traditional team dynamics by being a constant collaborator. It is reducing the need for junior developers to rely heavily on senior colleagues for guidance. AI tools can now provide that guidance in real time, helping to level the playing field and accelerate the onboarding process for new team members.

The Bottom Line

AI is not just a tool for improving efficiency; it fundamentally reshapes how teams collaborate and innovate in software development. By automating routine tasks, enhancing cross-functional communication, and enabling more inclusive and democratized development processes, AI is setting the stage for a new era of teamwork.

As AI continues to advance, the future of collaborative software development looks promising. Human creativity and AI-driven automation will work together to unlock new levels of productivity and innovation. Teams will be able to confidently tackle increasingly complex projects, knowing that AI is there to support them at every turn.

[sanzaibian]

“Sir, here are the Beatty files.” The young woman told me, handing a USB key.

I have heard a lot about these files. They were intercepted in the town after which they’re named by the secret services a while ago, but were encrypted in such a puzzling way that only now can we view them. And of course, I am the first one to be able to review its content.

I know a lot of things, as it is my job to be informed of anything and everything happening around the world. I know the plans of China over Taiwan, the successor to the Ayatollah, the contents of the talks between Putin and Kim Jong-un, and all the current US military strategy. In my line of work, everything can happen, yet at no single point could I make sense of the Beatty files. Nor could anyone else for that matter.

I excused the young woman, bidding to her my thanks for the deciphering team, and went to the unused laptop I had prepared. When it comes to matters of national security, I cannot afford to be careless, and let anyone unlicensed to get access to this. So brand new laptop, created by us, which has never been opened, to open these files.

And so I fiddled with the parameters a bit, entering the secret code, and inserted the USB key to view its contents. Inside were a few files, all of which videos. Their names were not informative, since I know for a fact that their original names were not recovered, so I just opened the first file in the list.

The video opened looking down in a white cubic room, meaning it was very likely a security camera recording. In addition, there was the time indicated on the bottom right, yet something felt weird about how it was displayed… 15:58… 15:59… 15:60 ???... 16:01, etc. Why is it not counting time correctly ? Nobody indicates time like this ! It’s wrong, it’s incorrect ! I just opened it and there’s already something I cannot in any way explain !

Taking a deep breath, I look at the center of the screen, in which I have a good view of a man sat in a chair. He has tanned skin, black hair and black stubble, and a very developed musculature. He looks to be a very attractive middle-eastern man, although I cannot say which ethnicity he precisely has.

The chair he’s sitting on is quite massive, and he looks almost as if he is… restrained in it ? Yes, there seems to be little handcuffs tethering him to the armchairs. But most striking are the numerous tubes going out from his arms, legs, torso and even head, linked to some types of medical appliances I cannot recognize, as well as to a sort of glass tank.

Suddenly, I notice the deep voice of a man. I up the volume, and hear… a language I cannot understand.

“Tzai en 19/03, 2:17, en tzoujkbruoi odogattzion program en Scipio Labratory. Ny hse Hk. Adtem, tzai widt nyn hskadiais, Sjd. Fingtrosy ÿ Sd. Vagohs, ÿ naum wom fill no tzoujketvÿsn ekspÿrians widt no #1073 bymarjen.”

At first I get some German vibes from it, but then it seems to be Polish, and then French… Whatever that language might be, it is not one I have ever heard. The man in the chair looks around, seemingly half-dazed, as if he was drugged. I don’t know what will happen to him, yet I get the feeling that it won’t be a desirable fate.

Suddenly, another voice, that of a woman by the looks of things, speaking in that same strange language.

“Hsüzmalhsÿv drël en im.”

Then a buzzer sound. There seems to be some white substance flowing inside the man’s body, through the tubes from the medical appliances. As it flows, I can see his eyes starting to become more droopy, before fluttering, and then closing. At the same time, his body starts floundering in the restraints, as if he was keeping himself from falling asleep. But as time went on and the white liquid ran dry, all of his muscles were relaxing and his stance become limp, like that of a dysfunctional robot. However, looking at his accelerating breathing rhythm, it seems to my trained eye that he is not actually asleep. It’s only his body refusing to function correctly.

“Drël ingkatzt. Etvÿsn harjimÿll.” Says another voice, deeper than the last one, but not as deep as the first one.

I don’t really know what’s happening. If the counter on the bottom-right of the screen wasn’t ticking up, I would have thought that the image was frozen. But then, suddenly, I can hear a low sound in the recording. And that sounds starts creeping higher and higher, as if something was charging up… Yeah, definitively charging up, since I almost saw some lightning sparks going off from the chair…

I don’t know what’s happening, but it seems to be malfunctioning. The sparks make themselves more and more intense, and it almost seems as if the machine is ready to explode...

Just as I say that, the first deep voice makes itself heard once again, but this time more in a frustrated or worried tone than an official one.

“Sel heont havy… Go huop sel hstill pÿrdont...”

But suddenly, the sparks stop, and while the sound doesn’t stop, beige liquid start flowing into the pipes… from the man to the tank ? What is that thing ? I don’t understand ! However, I can hear cries of rejoice in the audience, with all three voices I’ve heard since then saying incomprehensible stuff that I wouldn’t even be able to transcribe. I guess they also didn’t think… whatever this is would work ?

I take a drink from my water bottle as I keep an eye on the video. However, since I need to reach my bag, I cannot actively monitor it. Besides, according to what I hear, nothing of note seems to be happening... But when I have put down the bottle, I stop the video. I rub my eyes, but even then, I still see it.

The man seems smaller.

Somehow.

I go back in the video to the time where the man with the deepest voice sounded worried and… Yeah, looking like that, it’s even more apparent. The man has been losing mass. And the tanks have been filled by this beige skin-color liquid… Heh, if I didn’t know I was in reality, I would have said that this is muscle-juice, but this is ridiculous…

Especially since the body mass hasn’t been the only thing to change.

As I play back the video and continue through the long haul of high-pitch noise and not much else, I notice that the man’s stubble seems to be disappearing… and his head hair growing as well, somehow ? It almost seems as if he’s becoming less masculine by the second, if it even makes any sense, even though nothing about this video actually makesanysense. If I didn’t know who supplied it to me, I would have said this was a fake…

As his pecs were shrinking, his arms were thinning, his waist narrowing and his legs slimming, his stance almost seemed to be relaxing further – if it’s even possible. I mean, I don’t know ! It’s just the impression that I’m getting ! As the last of his stubble vanishes, at least according to what I can see through the pixels, he almost seems to be getting cuter ? Whence more relaxed ? Fuck, this makes absolutely no sense whatsoever…

Oh. I know why I get this impression. It’s not anymore weird or nonsensical, but at least in this context it seems to make sense… I think he also is losing height. Yes, actually. Height. It’s almost as if someone took the textbook definition of a “twink” and decided to impart its characteristic on this poor fellow – don’t ask me why I know what it is.

As I continue watching in horror, the woman’s voice says, gleefully :

“Entzony as hen !”

How can they sound so… happy ? Happy to torture a man like this ? To, quite visibly, drain his muscles into those tanks that look more and more full ? It just goes beyond me ! Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen my fair share of horrible and unethical treatments, and a ton of unethical human experiments. But this by far takes the cake of the most disturbing thing I have ever seen ! They’re taking away what he is, his identity ! Him ! That’s the most cruel violation of human rights I have ever seen ! To gleefully disfigure someone like that…

The tanks have finished filling up, and the sound starts lowering in intensity. The man left looks only like a shadow of who he was. He still looks like himself, except devoid of any… meat, may I say ? When the machine was well and truly turned off, the deep voice rejoiced, seemingly announcing the success of that terrible plot.

“Fÿstyfuroll ! Oll fod havy kotzvong !”

Funnily enough, the first word made me think of “feast for all”, which just feels wrong given the context. On that, they all seem to have left the premises, as a nurse came in and untethered the poor man from all the equipment, and taking with her the tanks filled of muscle juice.

I continued watching, hoping that I would get to see the young man wake up.

And wake up he did, looking around, before standing up… and immediately falling. Presumably due to him not expecting to be this skinny. He then looked at himself, and had an utterly horrified look in his eyes, as if he was processing the fact that he was irremediably different.

He crawled towards the wall, and using that, he climbed back to standing, managing to take a position so that he could be looking at the camera.

And on that, the video suddenly stopped, leaving me on this freeze frame :

I absolutely don’t know what to do with that. Now I not only understand, but also feel how confused the secret services were by intercepting this message. It just seems wrong in so many ways, so much that… it might not even have occurred on Earth for all I know ! The language is unknown, but familiar. The way to count time is disturbing, but otherwise identical to ours. The events depicted are of typical mad experimentation, but in a manner that is unthinkable in my knowledge of the world.

I don’t have the strength to view any of the other videos, since they’re likely all the same amount of disturbing. So I close the laptop, and already starts asking myself the question I need to give an answer for my superiors :

Just what the hell are the Beatty files ?!

[cindol]

Just Tojo, sukuna and y/n being a unofficial relationship throughout their school years.

Fushiguro toji x black coded fem reader x Ryomen sukuna

In elementary it was of course cute how wherever sukuna went toji and y/n followed, both admiring the cute short pink haired young boy with Pokémon limited edition cards and the cool fake sticker he had on his arm. All of their parents found it adorable how the two would hang onto Sukuna’s arms and be by his side in any photos.

Come middle school and y/n branched out to feminine things and got her group of girlfriends, she found it so icky when people tried to ship her with the two boys. Whenever she came to cheer sukuna and toji on at soccer games she cringed when the popular boy satoru made teasing remarks.”you cheering your boyfriendsssss on y/n?” It made her cringe and make a exaggerating gagging sound while sticking out her tongue and crossing her eyes.

In high school there was a slight shift, a big shift actually. With developing bodies, especially y/n’s body and fashion sense developing and the two boys being well.. boys at the end of the day small feelings would arise. When they were hanging around in y/n’s decorated room and she spun around to show them a new pink dress she was sporting to the mall it took everything in toji to respond with a controlled response out his nasty new mouth, he kept quiet for a bit making y/n roll her eyes.”wouldn’t hurt for my two best friends to gimme a damn review of the dress y’know!” Sukuna rolled his eyes a bit at toji, it’s not like he was shaming since he wasn’t any better but he gave him a ‘keep it together dumbass’ look. He responded for toji and him,”you look ethereal y/n, don’t look a mess for once! Who knew ya could pull it off.” His compliment always came with a joking jab.

The two were over protective without noticing it too. Toji knew how his teammates on the school football team could be such pigs when it came to women and even spreading a rumor about a girl. Any type of,”you and sukuna be running a two man or what?” Line he shuts down. He knows y/n isn’t like that and wouldn’t even wanna be perceived like that. He groans when he first hears that and gives the teammate who said that a death stare as a way to say,”watch your damn mouth”

Everyone in their friend group could sense sometimes a tension between the 3 also. If y/n was out with one of the boys sometimes a innocent employee would ask if they were a couple y/n’s eyes would bulge while toji shakes his head chuckling. “Oh no no me and him aren’t— I would never sorry!” Y/n gets caught on her words a bit, it’s amusing to toji.

When it comes to men they’re protective too also. Anytime she’s speaking about one of their teammates in a lovesick manner they don’t break it to her easy, well sukuna does harshly.”don’t fuck with em, assholes with big egos.” It makes y/n giggle a little.”you have experience with guys like that kuna?” She flicks her wrist a bit too, it was no secret to toji or y/n that sukuna was a bit on the fruity side, but honestly who wasn’t in highschool? Sukuna just gives her the finger sighing.”just don’t date em, you’ll be sadly disappointed with a signed football in your hand at the end.”

Come college the three were even more cozy with one another without realizing it. Getting lucky and sharing a dorm gave them the freedom to be as comfortable with each other as they already were. The three slept together in Sukuna’s bed a lot, to much of his sukuna’s dismay. He always groans when he has Toji’s muscular figure hugging him by one side and y/n hugging him tighter but does he complain? Hell no. He wouldn’t admit it but he liked the warm comfort of the two overgrown babies.

Y/n acted much like a care taker to the boys sometimes. Based on a conversation she had with toji about him barely taking the time to eat and sukuna not even bothering to eat because of all the fast food restaurants he hates around his job she took it into her own hands to always cook for the all three of them. Before they even head out she sucks her teeth at him.”aht aht! Not having my friends pass out doing sweaty ass work, take the lunches.” Sukuna looked forward to it, she cooked to his taste never making a sloppy burger or fried food while she cooked the sloppiest for toji, he always says he would burn and sweat it off anyways.

At college parties she always had them dressing up making people looking forward to the trip. On Halloween sukuna dressing as a ketchup bottle and toji as a mustard bottle while y/n was a hotdog. On thanksgiving sukuna would be a turkey while y/n and toji are pilgrims. On Christmas y/n was a reindeer while sukuna and toji were elves. And even on Easter they all would dress as Easter bunnies. Nobody ever knew how y/n got these overgrown men to dress up.

[sebstanaddict]

Between Deadlines

CEO!Bucky Barnes x Reader Story

A/n: And he did it again. A simple photoshoot inspired me to write another one shot 🤭 I've been wanting to write CEO!Bucky for a while now, and his LA Magazine shoot finally did it for me. There's something about that sleek black suit and unbuttoned shirt that is so inspiring 😁 Anyway, hope you guys enjoy this enemies to lovers story. Please vote and comment. It would mean the world to me. Thank you.

Summary: James Buchanan Barnes is the CEO of Barnes Tech Solutions and reader is his CTO. When an ultimatum from a client forces them to work together overnight, what started off as competition and hate starts to turn into something else..

Pairings : CEO!Bucky Barnes x Reader

Warning: none, just a little fluff, let me know if you find anything

Word count : 2k words

Read more Bucky one shots here

---

Chrysler Building, New York

The client’s voice cut through the room like a blade. “I hired your company because I believed you were professionals. You promised to deliver a solution by now, but all I see is a half-baked product with a mile-long list of issues. How can I possibly take your team seriously?”

James Buchanan Barnes, CEO of Barnes Tech Solutions, kept his jaw tight as he leaned forward, attempting to salvage what he could. “We understand your frustration,” he said, casting a quick glance at Y/n, the company’s CTO, sitting beside him. “We’ve hit a few roadblocks, but we’re confident we can resolve this quickly with the right—”

The client held up a hand. “No more excuses, Barnes.” They fixed a hard look on both of them, voice icy. “Three days. That’s all you get. Either you deliver exactly what we need, or we’re done here. No payment, no future business.”

The client didn’t wait for a response, gathering their papers with a look of finality before sweeping out of the conference room, leaving James and Y/n in silence. They sat there for a moment, both stewing in the frustration and tension of the encounter.

“Well,” Y/n muttered, finally breaking the silence, “that went well.”

James shot her a look, a scowl tugging at his features. “Don’t start, Y/n. This is exactly why I said we should’ve focused more on the testing phase.”

She crossed her arms, glaring right back at him. “Focused on testing? You barely gave me enough time to build the initial code, let alone test it properly.”

He huffed, standing up with a tense shrug. “If I didn’t push you, we’d still be stuck in development. But maybe you prefer taking things slow, dragging your feet?”

She pushed back her chair and stood up, her face flushed with irritation. “Dragging my feet? Barnes, if you had any idea how hard I’ve been working on this project…”

“Hard enough to almost lose us a client?” he shot back.

They stared each other down, both brimming with frustration. She was about to retort, but he started to walk away, loosening his tie as he did. She noticed his hand move to the top button of his shirt, undoing it with a casual flick that made her breath catch. The first button opened, a sliver of skin peeking out, and her eyes were drawn to it, lingering a little too long before she snapped herself out of it.

“You coming?” He asked, turning slightly towards her with a slight smirk on his face.

Did he just catch her looking? His smirk was faint, but she could feel his gaze on her, the hint of amusement there that made her blush despite herself. She shook her head and tried to brush the thought away as she followed him out of the room.

In her office, they set up their laptops at her desk, side by side, both working in tense silence as they began reviewing the project’s remaining issues. The air was thick with unresolved friction, each of them trying to avoid any eye contact, but occasionally, James' gaze would drift to her, taking in the focused, determined look on her face.

As they settled into the work, their bickering continued, every small detail an excuse to challenge each other’s opinions.

“If we’d just skipped that last feature in the initial build, we’d be a lot closer to what the client actually wanted,” she huffed, tapping at her laptop with more force than necessary.

James scoffed. “That feature was the whole reason they were excited in the first place.”

Y/n rolled her eyes. “Well, then maybe you should’ve double-checked what they actually wanted instead of chasing every shiny idea they suggested.”

“Oh, so now it’s my fault?” he asked, pulling off his suit jacket in frustration. He tossed it onto the back of a chair, loosening his tie and rolling up his sleeves as he glared down at her. “It’s not like you ever told me we didn’t have the resources to support it.”

But her words stalled, eyes betraying her as they strayed to the way he’d rolled his sleeves past his elbows, exposing the firm, lean muscle of his forearms. She swallowed, her thoughts briefly scattering as her cheeks warmed.

James caught the way she suddenly went quiet, raising a brow at her. “Something wrong?” he asked, his tone a touch smug when he noticed the way her gaze flickered down and back up.

She quickly looked away, feigning indifference as she typed out a few lines of code. “Nothing at all,” she said, voice tight. “Let’s just… finish this thing.”

He smirked but didn’t push, though he was starting to feel a strange shift himself. Watching her in her element, every subtle movement and frustrated sigh, he felt his own irritation beginning to fade.

An hour later, they found themselves slowly starting to agree on things, the edge in their voices softening as they adjusted parts of the project together.

“Actually,” he muttered, leaning over her shoulder, “you might be right about that last module. It would probably run smoother without it.”

She glanced up, her expression a little surprised. “Did James Barnes just agree with me?”

He rolled his eyes, though there was a faint smile tugging at his lips. “Don’t get used to it.”

They shared a small, reluctant smile before diving back into the work, slowly aligning on solutions without the need to argue each point. As the hours went on, the initial hostility between them started to feel like a distant memory.

Later, they hit a breakthrough on a particularly tricky piece of code, and she couldn’t help the triumphant smile that spread across her face. “See? I told you it’d work.”

He chuckled, genuinely impressed as he met her gaze. “Alright, fine. You win this round, CTO.”

She felt her pulse quicken at the warmth in his voice, her defenses slipping further as she returned his gaze. “You’re not too bad yourself, CEO,” she murmured, allowing the rare compliment to pass between them.

With every line of code, every small decision they made together, the tension shifted. What had started as frustration and competitive energy had softened into something unspoken, something that simmered between them with each quiet moment they shared.

Around midnight, James leaned closer, scanning a line of code on her screen. “There’s an extra bracket here,” he murmured, his voice softer than usual. He didn’t move back, his presence just inches away, warm and solid. She could feel his breath against her cheek, and her pulse quickened.

Her voice came out softer than she intended. “I, uh… I see it. Thanks.”

The silence lingered, neither of them pulling back. She glanced up and met his gaze, her heart pounding as she realized just how close they were. For a split second, she thought he might kiss her, and her breath caught, but then he cleared his throat, straightening up as if the moment hadn’t happened.

“Right,” he said, though his voice was slightly rough. “Let’s keep going.”

They worked through the night, every so often stealing glances when the other wasn’t looking. And each time she glanced his way, she’d catch little details she hadn’t noticed before—the way his brow furrowed in concentration, the way his hand absently rubbed the back of his neck when he was frustrated. There was something almost endearing about it.

At one point, James got up to grab them coffee, and when he returned, he held out a mug with a slight, almost shy smile. “Thought you could use this.”

She took it, their fingers brushing for a moment, sending an unexpected warmth up her arm. “Thanks, Barnes. Didn’t think you’d be the coffee-fetching type.”

“Only for you,” he replied, his voice playful, but his eyes held something softer, something that made her heart skip a beat.

She’d always thought of him as brash, a bit arrogant, but there was a quiet intensity to him now, a focus that made her feel a strange pull in her chest. He wasn’t just the CEO who threw orders around; he was actually invested in making things work, pushing just as hard as she was.

She cleared her throat, trying to distract herself. “You know,” she said carefully, glancing at him, “for all the arguing, you’re… you’re actually a pretty good CEO.”

He looked up at her, a hint of surprise in his eyes. “You mean that?”

“Yeah,” she said, feeling a little heat rise to her cheeks. “You know how to get things done. You push people, but… it’s because you actually care about the company.”

A small smile tugged at his lips, softening his usually sharp expression. “Thanks. But honestly, Y/n, if anyone’s pulling this project together, it’s you. You’re the best CTO I’ve ever seen—our tech wouldn’t even be half of what it is without you.”

She felt her heart skip a beat at his words, warmth creeping up her neck. “I… didn’t know you thought that,” she murmured, her gaze dropping for a moment.

He leaned in slightly, his eyes holding hers with a strange intensity. “I mean it,” he said, his voice low. “You’re brilliant, Y/n. Sometimes I wonder what we’d do without you.”

Her breath caught at the way he looked at her, a deep, lingering gaze that was almost… tender. She could feel her pulse quickening, her heart pounding in a way she hadn’t expected. She swallowed, feeling the tension between them shift, morphing into something that felt a lot less like animosity and a lot more like anticipation.

As the hours ticked on and the city lights outside dimmed into early morning, Y/n leaned back in her chair, stretching her tired arms above her head. “Almost there,” she murmured, exhaustion heavy in her voice. “Just a few more adjustments.”

James had loosened another button by now, and her gaze flickered to the open collar of his shirt. It exposed just enough to be distracting—the slight glimpse of toned muscle, his collarbone, the warm skin beneath, the reflection of a gold chain she just noticed that he was wearing. She tried to tear her eyes away, but the sight had her more breathless than she’d care to admit.

He noticed her lingering stare, and a slight smirk tugged at the corner of his mouth. “Something on your mind, Y/n?” he asked, his voice lower, more teasing.

She cleared her throat, brushing it off. “Just… making sure you’re still awake,” she mumbled, hoping he couldn’t hear the sudden breathlessness in her voice.

He tilted his head, eyes fixed on her in that intense way that always made her heart skip a beat. “Awake—and noticing a few things myself,” he said quietly, his gaze drifting over her face, then her lips.

The air between them shifted, thickening with an unspoken tension. She could feel his closeness, the warmth radiating from him as he leaned in, just a little. She held her breath, waiting, unsure if he’d actually go through with it.

Then, as if making a decision, he reached out, brushing a strand of hair from her face. His fingers lingered by her cheek, his gaze dropping to her mouth as he edged closer. Her pulse raced, her heart pounding louder than any words.

Before she could second-guess the moment, his lips met hers, warm and unexpectedly soft, his hand cupping her cheek as he drew her in. It was gentle at first, tentative, as though he was testing the waters—but the moment she leaned into him, his kiss deepened, sending a shiver down her spine.

She felt her heart catch in her chest, and she knew that whatever this was between them, it was something she couldn’t ignore any longer.

When he finally pulled back, his forehead rested against hers, his eyes searching hers with a soft, almost shy smile. “You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to do that,” he murmured, a hint of vulnerability in his voice.

She laughed softly, a little breathless, her hands still resting on his shoulders. “Guess we’ve both been hiding things, then.”

He smiled, his fingers tracing along her jaw. “Maybe we’re better off working together than fighting, after all.”

She smirked, playfully nudging him. “Don’t think this means I’m going easy on you in the next project, Barnes.”

He chuckled, wrapping an arm around her waist. “Wouldn’t expect anything less, Y/n.” And with that, he leaned in and kissed her again, as the night slowly turned to dawn, the rivalry between them finally fading into something infinitely sweeter.

[snaccpopstudios]

Hi everyone! We're here with the long awaited post on our newest bachelor, Simoun. We know you've all been abuzz with questions about him so we hope to answer some of that in this deep dive into his creation. This post is in lieu of our usual Wednesday devlogs as we've been writing this over the span of several weeks, and was co-authored, edited, and reviewed by Tobias, Jude, ToyboxToonz, Primarvelous, and Sauce. The above image was drawn by @toyboxtoonz.

You can read the full post for free on Patreon, or click the readmore to see it all!

Personally speaking, some of my concerns since Simoun's debut are thoughts like "Do people think I'm making SnaccPop Studios push an agenda?" and "Do people think I'm going through a checklist while making new characters?" It's made it difficult for us to write this quickly because this is quite personal to myself and the rest of the sensitivity consultation team on the DachaBo team.

Concept to Creation

The story of DachaBo begins way before SnaccPop Studios itself was even a concept (that's Sauce's story to tell though). Early Patreon art of Simoun exists from November 2022, back before I was signed on to manage the Patreon and any other projects besides Sunny Day Jack. Sauce had some ideas laying around for several other characters in the DachaBo universe that didn't make it into the proof-of-concept demo:

I dug up an old draft for the DachaBo cat character we teased and it featured a story concept where the cat character was originally a female DachaBo character, referencing the original female design. And overtime he got tired of how he was being treated and decided to change his own self to reflect who he wanted to be, not the sycophants who collected the toys and whatnot ... It was shelved because I didnt have the means to sensitivity check it The designs are half cooked is all but he was supposed to be Indian ethnicity coded for no other reason than I've never seen a character like that

One thing that's important to note is that there definitely are Indian folks who are gender diverse (see Hijra on Wikipedia for a quick primer on one of the traditionally recognized nonbinary genders in South Asia) so it's not a novel concept by any means, but it's also not very common in media whatsoever.

Why The Long Wait?

One of the other contributing reasons as to why Sauce wasn't able to do much with the concept at the time is because we didn't have a VA for him confirmed yet, as I explained in May:

One thing that's rather unique to SnaccPop Studios in all of my experience as a game developer is the fact that all of our series involve coordinating with Voice Actors from the start, which means we need to take the VAs themselves into account when making characters. Adding another layer of complexity in hiring is the fact that SnaccPop Studios is a strictly Erotic Adult brand focusing on masculine love interests, and even if we focus more on the softcore, there's still the unfortunate stigma that any 18+ work has when attached to your name. All of these contributing factors make the potential talent pool that much smaller. This isn't to make excuses: I know SnaccPop Studios can do better on this front. While we can't make changes to some of the existing series' main cast (we don't want to put people out of a role they've been promised), we will do better moving forward to incorporate more diverse characters into our future titles, and that's a pledge

In the field of voice acting, it's best practice to cast actors with similar backgrounds to the character they're voicing, particularly for characters from marginalized populations (ethnicity, culture, gender, etc.), because it's a recurring issue in all professions where marginalized folks are regularly turned down for employment or career opportunities. You don't have to look far for instances where other voice directors failed to cast the proper talent for a character, even in the AAA sphere where they ought to have the resources to be able to find the proper talent; at SnaccPop, we wanted to avoid that situation at all costs.

Finding Simoun's Voice

So we had to confirm a VA first before we could do anything. Sauce, Reece, and I all tried to put private ads out for a trans masc POC (any ethnicity with dark skin) actor for a R18 game, which was largely met with silence at first, then responded to by folks who didn't fit the role in a full capacity (many only hit one or two of the criteria we laid out, some of them none at all). And it's not hard to imagine why: it's common knowledge that the majority of erotic works often fetishize marginalized people who are otherwise underrepresented in mainstream media. Things such as skin color, body type, hair color, age, etc. are treated as traits to be objectified, and on the off chance that queer folks or people of color might see themselves in porn… it's usually not for the most flattering or empowering of reasons. How could we, an exclusively Adults-only studio, convince someone who isn't familiar with us that we wanted to make something for people like them rather than something that turns them into mere masturbating material?

We were almost about to give up on the Catboy until I decided to take a chance on contacting a VA whom I hadn't had any formal and proper interactions with before. I'd been a fan of his work and knew him from an audition he sent in from a previous game I had worked on, but he knew me solely by name at best since we were following each other on Twitter. Still, it was a lead, and after chewing my nails for half a day, I shot off a message to Soren Viloria.

And what do you know? He said he'd give it a shot as his first NSFW role.

Naming the Lad

Soren is a Filipino VA, and despite the fact that I myself seem to be mistaken as Filipino by other Asians quite regularly, I'm actually not as well-versed in that culture as I ought to be.

There's actually a reason why we were so secretive with Simoun's name for a while: he didn't have one yet, so internally we just kept calling him "the Catboy." We wanted to pick a culture-appropriate name for him, something that was meaningful: Soren initially suggested "Siopao" as it was a common cat name (it's a type of Filipino Steamed Bun, so think of how many pets you've seen who have names like Cupcake or Nacho Supreme), but that didn't seem serious enough for a tsundere catboy like him. A few days later, Soren did a little research on a few well-known characters from Philippine media/culture that fit the bill a bit better:

Elías from the Philippine Revolution novel Noli Me Tángere (a required reading in the Philippines). Cat may like his radical tendencies for revolution and his deep, devoted connections.

Simoun from Noli's sequel, El filibusterismo. Holds revolutionary values similar to Elías, but far less noble and more of a loner. Violent at times, and will do what it takes to get his way.

Panday/Flavio, a very popular hero. Part of his charm is that he doesn't have special powers, but took matters into his own hands and forged a magical blade. Has been portrayed in both 'cool' and comedic ways.

Ricardo "Cardo" from the Philippines' longest-running TV drama Ang Probinsyano. Just a cool action hero dude who cares about family, but is also very ambitious and angy.

Seeing as how we already had an Elias Gallagher, Simoun seemed to be the perfect fit, and the name stuck pretty easily.

Simoun's Boundaries

Now that Simoun had a name, we were able to talk about him more seriously beyond the simple "tsundere cat" tropes. You've all already met Gil Finnegan, who we originally brought into SnaccPop Studios to handle the narrative design for DachaBo but was then onboarded to help with Sunny Day Jack, and those of you in the Patreon Discord server are familiar with our mods Tobias and Jude; along with me and Soren Viloria, that brought the grand total of openly trans masculine members on the team.

We all talked about our personal experiences as trans masc/AFAB people, what things we rarely saw reflected in both mainstream and indie media, things we wanted to see more of. Something we all agreed that was difficult to find was trans masculine folks in sexually dominant roles in erotic media, whether that was live video, audio, writing, art, or a combination thereof; there was only a handful of series we could count on our fingers as far as sexually explicit content that featured trans masculine people in roles that weren't exclusively submissive/bottoms, and the majority of us had already seen those or at least heard of them before (ie. Gummy and the Doctor and Sasha From The Gym were prominent ones). Either discovering this content was difficult due to Search Engine Optimization favoring depictions of trans feminine folks, or it simply didn't exist.

All of this, along with the backstory that Sauce had for Simoun, led us to determine that Simoun would be adverse to submissive roles in intimate situations. Simoun isn't the type to want to be penetrated either due to previous trauma surrounding his gender. Bear in mind that this isn't meant to imply or suggest that there is only one "acceptable" sexual preference for trans masculine folks, nor is Simoun meant to represent all of trans masculinity; he may be our first trans masculine character but certainly isn't the last, as we hope to feature more types of characters at SnaccPop Studios.

As an aside, it should be noted that the trend of erotic trans feminine content being more readily available doesn't necessarily mean that trans women have more positive representation per se; for every kinky piece of art created by trans feminine folks out there, there could be ten more works that fetishize and objectify their bodies. We probably don't need to tell you about the common derogatory slurs that have been used to refer to them; trans feminine and trans masculine people deal with varying levels and types of transphobia as well as situations that oversexualize (or even undersexualize) them, and it's important to focus on content that doesn't strip them of their autonomy.

There actually was a period of time between the release of his concept art after Soren was onboarded where the team observed comments both on Patreon and in the Discord regarding Simoun, and we discussed how we could avoid having people try to ship Bo and Simoun together; because Simoun hasn't had bottom surgery of any kind, we wanted to ensure that tokophobia (fear of pregnancy) or dysphoria wouldn't become a thing for any of us involved in the team or for our trans masculine Patrons. It was a bit of a chicken or the egg situation, trying to keep up with the evolving comments about Simoun to try and anticipate what people might accidentally say.

Debut Day Thoughts, & Moving Forward

We were quite happy with the general reception everyone had with Simoun, and we're excited to see so many people taking a liking to Simoun after his reveal. SnaccPop Studios has always strived to provide inclusive and diverse stories for those who don't often get represented in media, much less NSFW media, and the team was quite elated to see folks who were just as happy to see Simoun.

We hope that the love and care we put into building Simoun has shone through in this post and will continue to shine as we write more of him for DachaBo, because we're just getting started.

[kremlin]

I do computer work but it's not very hard and kind of boring. How do I get to do hard computer work? Do I have to go to grad school?

hi i tend to miss these because of slipshod ublock custom filters im too birdbrained to fix.

i worked for a large american technology company which sold business machines internationally for close to a decade until laid off in successful accounting fraud scheme a few years ago. started as developer, erm, pardon me, i started as

junior developer

which is a role similar to routinely-executed court jester and human meatwave conscript meant to soak up enemy bullets to cause exhaustion of enemy bullet supply and finally guy that comes in big gross truck with a pump and a tank and a big hose used to suck the shit+piss out of portable toilet/malfunctioning sewer etc. this is for when you are 20 years old or so and they hit you with this work to calm your ass down a bit. my case was cloud bullshit on ancient rickety php stack. 5% keystrokes/clicks are php, 95% remainder is jira and other members of the axis of evil. LOT of dick sucking and butt fucking. Going into men's bathroom and making eye contact with cubicle neighbor before entering stall and fearlessly making disgusting noises. microwaving fish lunch thrice daily. you get the idea. meager paycheck but six figures takehome technically

next is staff dev, wait, god damn fucking tumblr, you can't adjust fonts mid-paragraph, and Big Text is just another type of font, in case you wanted Big Specific font. fucking fuck hold on. next step is

staff developer

no effective change besides greatly increased workload (click those motherfucking jira buttons!! suffer coworker's asinine bad-faith code review comments that HE AND HE ALONE must manually accept your responses to, on HIS time, before you are allowed to click the jira buttons that start the human meat sausage factory to get your 20 line maximum change into an RC and then release and then push candidate and then prod push!! pay raise one thousand dollars annually (lol). Emails. Now you deal with project manager too. speculate as to what sorts of grievous head injuries that man must suffer daily to describe his logic. his job is like the guy from office space that brings documents from one desk to another but he randomly reorders the words on the page in-flight. make plausibly-deniable wife fucking jokes about his wife in earshot. you're almost at the top of the suffering function. next is, no fucking cute font this time, senior developer, sounds cool right, lol, lmao, "senior" "developer" is like "tallest" "midgit".

no pay increase no workload increase but now manager emails you about extremely, extremely personal issues he's facing and also makes his most difficult problems from his boss your problems. one week will pass and then they will hit you with the "we're considering you for a team lead position". answer:

NO

answer no as this is the prescribed path, you take that role, you are maxxed out in workload, you are dealing with forty employee's worth of bullshit, another one thousand dollarinos a year raise, employer has solved efficiency problem with your sanity and burnout as variables. you're supposed to quit or kill yourself within seconds of hitting 30 y/o. don't fall for tricks. say "NO" in a creative way such as "i have tabulated some data and made it into excel pie chart quantifying diff. departments work output and am considering sending it to whoever Dave is, the guy that is one or two or three report levels over your boss' head, you know, his boss' boss' boss or whatever. or say "you are harassing me sexually, racistly" that kind of shit. make threat clearly.

was worth mentioning before, throughout all of this make as many friends and as much of a splash for yourself as possible as its time to trade on that goodwill, tell your boss you want an open relationship and you're going to fuck and suck other managers, and then find the good one with the good team of old fucking geriatric guys who could never be fooled into working more than a reasonable amount daily and also can kill people with their minds since they have been sitting on the bleeding edge of computing since 1969. their boss will usually be, suspiciously, one report rank higher than everyone else. e.g. their boss has a whole other boss + his reports under him. usually small team. go to their boss, say, hi, look at me, look at my beautiful plumage and captivating mating dance, please hire me, pleassseee. his team will say no, they will say things like "I don't know about that kiddo", "That guy seems like a candy-ass", they will read your papers and look at you in the eyes and say it is not compelling, the boss will kind of hire you anyway. if he doesn't you're fucked. if he does you're now a

STAFF ENGINEER

for fifteen minutes and then

ADVISORY/SENIOR/SPECIAL ENGINEER

and the suffering is over. no code minimal jira + squad of gremlin zerglings under your boss whom you can rank-pull and delegate bullshit to, they will be mostly suckers, take advantage of this. 80% of keystrokes/clicks will be in production of beautiful wonderful lovely .docx and .xlsx's, what a godsend, only in an emergency are you allowed to fuck with your zergling's code, usually in a cool way with bullshit procedure removed.

i worked on high performance computing shit. "what the fuck do you mean 2PB or so in and out a day on flash memory", "what the fuck do you mean special infiniband intel MPI library on CD-R stored in Craig's filing cabinet???". Meetings with company people: webcams off, responses optional, snideness allowed. Meetings with client: you must have your dress shirt starched and white glove the shit out of those motherfuckers. timezones = skill issue. i don't care where germany is, i don't give a shit, wake up at 3am for a 20m meeting i take on the toilet or while eating a boiled lobster complete with cracker + lobster bib. customers countable on one hand, invoices to customers not countable with 32 bits. no fucking mistakes ever allowed except for like whitepaper drafts, you cannot fuck the pumpkin on this one, your actual job relies on your ability to hit a button and suck down a week's worth of compute and millions of dollars, boiling swimming pool's worth of TDP, one mistake that leads result data to being able to be characterized as flawed and your balls are getting ripped off. Quarterly IRL meetings = normiepilled normiemaxxing. Dress sharp. leave at 5pm on the dot, go to bar with Old Fucker coworkers, drink wrecklessly with them, have a blast, let them give you a tour of a lab you are absolutely 100% not allowed to be inside, buildings that have posted weight limits per sq. ft. exceeding 250lbs, such a blast. every paycheck a FORTUNE every dinner a banquet every meeting an email every keystroke life or death. you get to meet /lib/doug mofos too one of whom i wrote a very poor kind of poem thing about. thats about it. hope this helps

[trifargo]

Persona 5 Kitchenette (Cooking)

is a P5 game idea i came up with... instead of the main PT, the stars here are the auxiliary phantom thieves instead (and joker): akechi, sumire, sophia, zenkichi, and toshiro. this came be because i'm annoyed at how zenkichi (and sophia) are not in P5T, so i thought "you know what, because i am complaining about the lack of P5S guys in P5T, and the royal trio fans complain about the lack of P5R guys in P5S, what if i merge the left out folks in a game. world peace???"

it's basically cooking mama, but a bit more elaborate. the game will be split in 3 parts: shopping, teaching, and cooking. more below (VERY LONG)

storyline

winter holiday is coming up. joker and the gang plans another reunion in leblanc. but then, joker remembers something: the team was bigger, sometimes. there are some of the PT comrades that have yet to chat and meet with them, or even with each of them. so he decided to whip up a surprise: he'll invite not only the main PT, but also the auxiliaries, to meet with each other and the main team.

so joker invited the auxiliary gang ahead of the D-Day. and to make the smaller mini reunion more fun, he decides to do a cooking lesson with them, and they have to cook this on the real reunion day - for the main PT gang.

for the mini reunion, they'll be cooking in sojiro's house, instead of leblanc because of course, leblanc will be filled by customers, duh! they'll have some chats - the awkward one, funny one, annoying one... some character developments and look deeper on the ideals and meanings from the journeys each aux members have gone through. exploring the possible paralels in each characters, contrasts, and what they have been doing while they're off the game.

gameplay

the game is basially visual novel with minigames. it has 2 modes:

story mode: follows the story above. the story itself won't be long, probably like... 3 hours? 5? i dunno. it will play like P5T format: gameplay - dialogue - repeat. i personally find this format to be monotonous to enjoy, so the break sections (the one with menus) will probably allow you to walk around the house and outside? still, all you can do here is talk, so probably there'll be reward for talking. maybe bonuses to ease your next minigame. the character you'll be playing as is scripted.

free mode: you can cook whatever you want in here. it's off from the main story, so treat it like an "what if" (like joker's wedding scenarios in P5T). you can cook whatever you want - there are even new recipes in this mode! complete all the recipes perfectly to achieve platinum. you can pick anyone you'd like to play as (though they determine the kind of minigame you'll be playing, being shopping/teaching/cooking - except joker, he can play all these three).

meanwhile, the game parts are as below. these aren't super fixed or anything, could be changed.

shopping: you'll be playing as sophia. retaining her role in PT as a vendor, your job is to shop the items joker is asking you. joker will give you some items to buy. each item are bought by playing 2 minigames: maze and "find the difference".

maze: sophia has to find the right website to buy the item... by donig code blocks, because she's an AI. code it right, so sophia won't get lost among the sea of websites... the most monotonous one i guess, as there isn't many varieties to it...

find the difference: joker wants these items precise, so you gotta pick the right shop and item based on joker's note. plays like papers, please!, where there are details you can inspect deeper to match and make sure you get the right one (like fake customer reviews, for example)

2. teaching: you'll be playing as sumire and toshiro. each of them will do 1 recipe (so 2 recipes in total). they can cook well, so joker would like you to teach akechi and zenkichi how! teaching is kinda half-half on cooking and "pick the right one" game.

cooking: your job is to prepare the ingredients. these are too advanced for those bad cooks, so hopefully this will ease their process (like preparing fish from the bones, or whole chicken).

"pick the right one": basically making sure those bad cooks do the instructions properly (example, placing the right step to do in the progress bar in stirring process), with a timer.

3. cooking: you'll be playing as akechi and zenkichi. each of them will do 1 recipe (so 2 recipes in total). they're confirmed to be bad at cooking, so joker wants them to learn cooking better... for akechi so he can stop buying take outs, and for zenkichi so he can cook for akane better. this one is full cooking a la cooking mama, so their mingame depends on the recipe they're cooking.

for the mini reunion, you'll be playing shopping and teaching. sophia will shop the ingredients for both mini reunion and reunion day, while sumire and toshiro will teach you how to cook in mini reunion day. in the real reunion day, you'll be playing cooking only.

i was thinking to pair sumire-zenkichi and toshiro-akechi, because pairing sumire-akechi will probably develop less new things from them, as they've met in P5R. but i'm sure that developing new things isn't everything - i think akechi-sumire is a lacking connection in the royal trio triangle, and i'm sure this game will also be about getting new interactions from the established character dynamics. so probably, first half of the teaching/cooking section will be sumire-zenkichi and toshiro-akechi, while the second half is the opposite (or you can swap the order). so you get all.

as for morgana (because morgana is always next to joker), he'll be there as emotional support commentary cat during the gameplay. sophia can also be one during teaching/cooking.

as for the recipes, some will be taken from joker's kitchen in P5S. the ultimate recipes, leblanc coffee and curry, will only be unlockable in free play.

costume

i approached this one with functionality & "what would atlus do", even when i don't know what people wear at winter!!! otherwise, i'd take joker's glasses off and all that... though i believe i can be better at the color picks - i don't think atlus does color coding that much, judging the costume variants in the game. everyone who has long hairs will be tied, because like futaba said:

joker: i observed that his wardrobe is mostly plain, no pattern or peculiar detail. so i gave him shirt with not too much decor other than the buttons and black lines on end, and jeans to make it homey, but still kinda formal for guest visits. joker's appron is the appron he use in leblanc. nothing fancy behind it...

akechi: i noticed a running joke about akechi and plaid patterns when i was doing scramble zine and ya. all his wardrobe has that. so i gave him yellow plaid outer. he sorta has earthy color and his party color is brown. but his pants are already beige, so it's... yellow. his appron is kinda fancy, but still clean sleek. has metallic accents (pocket pins and harness) to give a bit boldness to it, vibing his loki side. i came up that shido facilitated him the appron if he wants to cook himself, but too bad he doesn't know that akechi can't cook...

sumire: she starts to feel more comfortable living as sumire again, so she wears the glasses back. i left her hairstyle as is, as it has lore. her fit is mostly opposite of kasumi, being more modest. color is from the violet dress she bought with joker in 3rd semester. her appron is... this wasn't really the plan (i think of picture printed appron), but i can't come up with a design yet!!! so i think she'd just have normal appron, but with patterns. kinda looks aunty/mom vibes... i think of the tora shirt she picked with joker. it's pretty mom/aunty vibes and sumire wasn't actually sure when she picked that, but i think she eventually developed a slight interest in those kind of patterns. i'm still considering to change the design, though... not 100% fixed.

sophia: she's a unique case, as her role/game is not cook, but shopper! so she becomes a delivery girl. ichinose came up with her look. so i gave her delivery jacket. her design is the most difficult, as i don't usually like drawing overdecorated anime fits, and how sophia is meant to evoke friendliness according to soejima & kanda, plus keeping her minimalistic aesthetics. then i combined the details it with puffer jackets, while making sure it's not overdecorated and making it as similar as sophia's original shilouette. IMO it became a bit too playful, as i slapped colors that are not in her original design. the blue green red accent is taken from sophia's shop UI. treat it like sophia's shop employee jacket! her footwear is a bit taller and is a shoe now. she's travelling the net, so...

zenkichi: the adults are tricky. they still wear the suit, so i could only change the shirt and tie. zenkichi's design is pretty normal common, even his design uniqueness is logical: when people's shirt button are usually similar colored to the shirt, his is a peculiar black. so i gave him pocket with black lining... he'll mostly be off suit, so there's no problem with suit obscuring pocket. his tie is also off. his appron is new. but because he doesn't know much cooking, he bought an overkill appron, AKA a barista appron with many pockets...

toshiro: i'm not really sure what is his job after P5T... but i assume he still wears suit around. so he wears a pale purple shirt. his tie is still purple, but grid pattern. he doesn't wear gloves anymore too, of course. i don't know toshiro's icon. we need to think that... his appron is plain, simple, and functional. the best that works with his housechores, something he excels at.

bonus contents

i'm thinking of a DLC with another character that have big impact to the story, but also too out of the picture to come back: maruki. i haven't decided how it will be like though. for now, i'm thinking either of these:

a separate day in the story, where you just cook with maruki. no shopping section in this DLC, just cooking and teaching. they both will teach a recipe to each other, and talk a bit more about how's maruki been doing.

a dream section or something? comes down to whether i can come up with a reason to summon the other PT auxes to this story. basically, besides maruki, you can invite 1 more guy from the list of PT auxes to cook with him. so each character will have their own storyline. more on this option:

sumire will be about reflecting their past relationship and how things are now, akechi about 2/2 (but pretending they don't meet, so it fits both who do the akechi and normal versions) and probably shido ties, toshiro and zenkichi about what happened to them in 3rd semester and how they feel when they found out, and sophia about learning maruki's heart research.

i assume toshiro is immune to maruki's influence in a way for now, because erina was born to protect him from godly influence... or maybe because salmael has taken place? i dunno. could be he's not immune either though, if erina's meant to only protect from salmael and not maruki.

[flightrising]

Summary: Emergency Maintenance

At approximately 14:00 Server Time on Friday, March 31 the engineering team was alerted to an individual probing for XSS (Cross-Site Scripting) weaknesses by pasting HTML script tags in various text fields on the site, some player-facing and some only visible to staff. Out of an abundance of caution we put the site into maintenance so we could evaluate the situation.

During the maintenance period, we reviewed the attacker's activity, focusing in particular on what fields the attacker typed script tags into. Then, we reviewed what pages (player-facing and staff-facing) display the contents of those text fields, whether those pages are properly escaping the text in question to prevent XSS vulnerabilities, and whether anyone viewed those pages while they potentially contained text content from this attacker.

Because it is part of our development practices to evaluate all new and revamped/refactored features for XSS vulnerabilities, we could not find issues in player-facing areas such as Forums, Private messages, Clan Info, or Dragon Biographies, or our primary staff-facing tools. We did identify and correct issues in some of our rarely used staff-facing tools that were not used while this attacker was active. Additionally, we identified some extremely old code that had potential issues and corrected them, but these areas are not areas where content entered by the attacker could have been viewed by another player or staff.

While XSS has a broad scope, one of the major concerns in any XSS attack is the potential that session cookies—tokens stored in your browser that "prove" that you are a particular logged-in user—could be stolen by an attacker, allowing them to essentially be "logged in" as you without knowing your password. Our session cookies are all set to use the "HttpOnly" flag which means that scripts categorically cannot access them. Barring vulnerabilities in browsers themselves, we do not believe session cookies were immediately at risk. Nonetheless, we revoked all outstanding staff and volunteer moderator sessions early on in our investigation as a safety measure.

Again, while we do not believe player sessions were at risk for the above reasons, if you wish to revoke all outstanding sessions for your account, including those for browsers/devices other than the one you are currently interacting with the site with, you can change your password either via Account Settings or the Forgot Passwordfeature.

In addition to reviewing our existing code, we also looked into ways to detect and block this sort of behavior proactively. We have made some initial changes in that area and we are going to continue to improve our security posture by adding additional layers of protection, detection and alerting. Please bear with us as some of these changes may introduce minor bugs while we fine-tune things.

In summary, at present we believe this individual was at the stage of probing for vulnerabilities, and we used the maintenance period to review and strengthen our protections against this sort of attack. We do not have reason to believe the attacker accomplished anything of major concern at this point.

If you believe you have found a vulnerability of any kind anywhere on Flight Rising, please disclose it to us privately using Contact Us right away.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

[ggidolsmuts]

Fromis App Part 13: (F)App Developer - Fromis_9 Nagyung

"Nagyung, you wanted me to come here? Where's Saerom?" She's sitting at the CEO's desk, typing away on her laptop.

"Oh, over here!" Nagyung waves lively at you, bouncing in the chair. "We have a job to do!"

"We do? Where's Saerom?"

"She's on a business trip, and yes, we have to work." You find yourself nodding before something strikes you.

"Nagyung, what exactly do you do here?"

"I'm Assistant CEO, or Assistant to the CEO, and I'm the app developer."

"How can you be an assistant and the app developer?"

"I help Saerom when she needs it, and when she doesn't need it, I develop the app."

"What do you help Saerom with?" Nagyung hems and haws, suddenly looking flustered.

"I perform various functions in a variety of situations," she manages to say formally.

"That told me nothing, what do you do?"

"A-a multitude of things, you know, many of them, a cornucopia of errands—" Nagyung waves her hands around vaguely.

"Sure, I'll take your word for it. And the rest of the app team does it when you're busy?"

"Team? What team?"

"The development team, for the app? Who do you discuss stuff with?"

"My rubber duck! There is no team, I am the app developer."

"Like, the only app developer? Is that why it's so slow, why there's so few people on the app? You need to scale!"

"Yah! It takes time you know? To come up with ideas to implement, and I have so many other ideas, so it takes time to get around to the Fromis App!"

"Fine, what do you need me to do then?"

"Oh, be my code peer and watch me as I code, that's what Saerom would do."

"Really? Saerom reviews your code?"

"Yeah, that's how I got the position in the first place!"

"How did you get the position in the first place?" you ask, incredulous.

"Oh, it was between me and Chaeng, wasn't really close though, Chaeng's code looked like she wrote it with her feet. She said my code looked like I just sat on the keyboard, but Saerom agreed with me in the end and made me the developer."

"That explains so much..." you mutter under your breath. "Never mind, sure, I'll watch, what are you doing today?"

"Just running some unit tests? I finished up a feature that lets one more person onto the platform, just needs to pass the tests and off to production it goes." Shiftily Nagyung looks around, peering outside the office to see if anyone's watching. She presses a button and the glass walls turn opaque. "And let's have some fun, I finally get you to myself."

"Work hard, play hard hmm?"

"Yup!" Nagyung beckons you over to Saerom's chair, and you sit down before she gets in your lap, spreading her legs as she pulls the two of you towards the desk. She's trapped between you and the desk, and your hands find their way around her midriff. "I can feel your python extending already!" She grinds herself on top of you, and you groan as she gives you an impromptu lapdance. Cheekily she kisses your jaw, "I can't wait to import your package into me."

"Nerdy dirty talk? That's a first." Your hands unbutton her tight pants and pull the zipper down.

"You like it? I can't wait for you to overflow my container, maybe we can init a baby together... Like my code, my body has no exception handling, it's so unsafe." You promptly button her pants again.

"Okay that is more worrying than sexy, your code has no exception handling?"

"That's what you got out of it?"

"When you still have work to do, yes."

"Let's just play first, then work later?" Nagyung pouts, pulling your hands back to her pants.

"How about a little bit of both, how many tests do you have?"

"Fifteen, I think."

"Okay, for every test you pass, I'll pleasure you for 4 seconds, for every test you fail, you have to pleasure me for 4 seconds, deal?"

"And if they all pass?"

"Then we can have fun."

"Okay!" You idly fondle Nagyung as she starts typing, but you don't play too hard with her, making sure she can still do her work. "And done!" The two of you watch with bated breath as the tests run—7 failed and 8 passed. "What now?"

You're back to unbuttoning her pants, sliding them down a little. "I'll pleasure you first, then you pleasure me." Nagyung tries to work on your jeans blind, and you help her out by pushing them down a little.

"Or we pleasure each other at the same time." Her hands slip under your boxers as yours slip under her panties, and the two of you play with each other, stroking and rubbing all over. You gently part her lips, running your fingers along her labia and collecting her wetness. Nagyung shudders and moans as you bring a thumb to her clit. She pays back in kind, a hand stroking your shaft before running a finger over your tip, gently teasing the underside of your head. You hiss and grab her arm, forcing her to stop.

"I owe you 4 more seconds." You make the 4 seconds of pleasure feel like 40 as you frig her intensely, and Nagyung cries out loud as she rushes towards her climax.

"Fuck, oh fuck! No!" she whimpers as you pull away at the last second, leaving her keeled over the laptop without satisfaction. Your fingers draw circles over her abdomen, leaving her wanting more.

"Keep working."

Nagyung whines, but her hands reach for the keyboard again. Her head is still fuzzy from the near-climax, and her fixes are sloppy, causing the program to error out and all the tests to be skipped. She owes you a minute of pleasure.

"What, no!"

"That counts, none of the tests passed."

"They never even ran!"

"Because of your fault! One minute of pleasure please." Nagyung pouts, but she starts rubbing you again, stroking you with a firm grip. You feel her all over for the minute, your hands snaking under her top, cupping her perky breasts, rubbing her tummy—you touch her everywhere but between her legs.

"Enough, back to coding." You briefly brush her slit, and Nagyung shudders before reluctantly going back to the keyboard. You're content to continue roaming her body with your hands as she taps on the laptop.

That is, until you see her commit a cardinal sin. You grab her arms and pull them away from the keyboard, and she's pinned between you and the desk as you lean forward to whisper in her ear.

"Nagyung, did you do what I think you just did?"

"N-No? What do you mean?"

"Did you just comment out some of the tests?" Nagyung tries to hit Ctrl-Z and undo her work, but you stop her, and her handiwork is clear as day. "That is very very bad Nagyung."

"B-But I can't figure out how to fix it right now!"

"You still shouldn't do that, on your knees." Nagyung slides off you, and as she turns to face you it is clear what her punishment is. She reaches for your shaft as your hands go to her head. Firmly you push your tip past her lips, and her tongue welcomes you with licks and flicks.

"Mmm!" Nagyung squeezes your thighs as you get deeper into her, and you slow down but keep pushing.

"You can take it, keep going." Your cock looks extra big in Nagyung's mouth, and she pants as you put more of yourself into her. She coats your shaft with saliva, and it starts leaking out the sides of her mouth. Your fingers tighten their grip on her hair. "Okay?"

Nagyung looks up at you and hums assent. "Hmm hmm!" You start moving her head back and forth while lightly thrusting yourself.

"Touch yourself!" Nagyung's hand disappear from your thighs, and her arm starts moving quickly, jilling herself while she looks up at you. You start pumping yourself faster, and Nagyung's moans are interrupted by your thrusts.

"Mmm, mmghk! Guhhlk! Haghkk..." The resulting sounds are obscene, gagging sounds mixed with pleasured moans as you go faster than she's used to. But she doesn't tap out, so you keep going, and you fingers twist in her hair and you hold her there. Your grunts are the only sound in Saerom's office as you manually put Nagyung on mute, dumping your load into her mouth and down her throat.

"Mmm fuck!" you groan with a relish as you pull out of Nagyung's mouth. Nagyung continues touching herself, her arms working overtime even as you pull her up to her feet. She whines, but you make her sit back in your lap.

"Can I cum?"

"Are you going to comment out unit tests in the future?"

"No I won't! Please?"

"Maybe you'll program properly with your head clear, fine." You brush Nagyung's hand aside and plunge your own fingers into her. Nagyung squeals at your larger fingers inside her, and all it takes is a few rapid schlicks before she twitching in your lap, coating your digits in her juices. She goes limp externally, but internally she is overclocked, spasming and contracting around you rapidly.

"Ah! Damn..." Nagyung sighs as she comes down, content. "That was good."

"Ready to get back to work?"

"Do I have to? Can't you just bend me over the desk?"

"I think Saerom would not be happy that work wasn't done, besides I need a bit of time."

"Fine." You take Nagyung's hand and suck her fingers clean.

"There, now you can use the keyboard again." You lower your voice to a whisper, "And once you're done I'm going to eat you up."

With the promise of more and post-orgasm clarity Nagyung is extra motivated to finish, and her head is clear as she quickly fixes her prior mistakes. Soon, more tests start to pass—4, then 3, then 2 failures. You spend more and more time bringing her close to her next orgasm, and she has enough time to get you hard again.

"Okay, hopefully this fixes everything." Nagyung takes a deep breath and runs the tests. She squeals when it comes out all green. "Yay, commit and push!" She types a random sequence of letters as the commit message and pushes it.

"Wait, what about a pull request? QA testing?"

"Don't care, I'm the only developer! We're done!" You close the laptop and shove it to the side.

"No, you're done." You push Nagyung off you and stand up. Like a computer program you do exactly as she says and bend her over the desk. With a hand on her back and one on her hips you pin her there and open up her port.

"Oh fuck, yes!" You plug yourself in Nagyung, and then you unplug, and then you plug in again. The two of you form a wet USB link, male and female connectors plugging and unplugging over and over. It is also a USB-C connection, and on every thrust you plug smoothly into her, causing Nagyung to power up and cry out in pleasure. To prove the point you flip Nagyung on to her back and plunge into her once more—no issues there, no need to flip her back, and she moans once more.

You power-cycle Nagyung's mind, making her body twitch and jerk as you fuck her through multiple orgasms. You're quickly rushing to your own end, intending to transfer your genetic data to her through the Fill Tight Pussy protocol.

"Nagyung I'm gonna—"

"Inside!" she shrieks. Her body feels you throb harder and faster inside her, and she cries and wraps her legs around you, making it a secure FTP transfer. You hump her against the desk, and soon you are forced to execute your biologicial programming. Nagyung's subjected to a pussy overflow attack, and you inject your payload straight into her with a groan. Nagyung pulls you into her chest, and you leave love bites all over her neck as you finish delivering your load.

The two of you power down as you lie quietly on Saerom's desk. You kiss the woman-in-the-middle, and she giggles as you brush her hair aside.

"Oh, now you're gentle."

"You're the one who wanted me to bend you over."

"True, that was great." You eventually disconnect from Nagyung, a river of cum spilling on to Saerom's desk.

"Think she'll notice?" you ask as you hurriedly wipe the surface clean and rearrange things to where they were.

"Nah, she's not back for another week, it will be cleaned and wiped down properly by then." Nagyung reassures you as the two of you fix your clothes. You notice something odd out of the corner of your eye.

"Nagyung, is that a camera?"

"What?!" The two of you stare at the black orb in her ceiling, unseen until now. "Oh my god it is, why did she install one here?"

"Probably because I fucked Jiwon in here..." you groan, ruffling your hair in frustration.

"Really? Her too?" Nagyung interrupts herself. "Never mind, let's hurry up and go talk to Hayoung, maybe she can delete it for us."

"Hayoung? Why?"

"She's head of security, she has access to the camera feeds."

"Oh, let me go talk to her then, you should go back to, umm, doing whatever it is you do."

"Sounds good, very important stuff." Nagyung taps her laptop authoritatively. "Thanks for a good time, Master."

You do a double-take. "Master?"

"Yeah, I was reading about that, you're the Scrum Master, what we did was a scrum right? Lots of bodies moving around, some work got done, your hips were agile. You were leading it, so you're the Master."

"Oh god, that is so wrong but I don't have time to explain it, don't call anyone else Master."

"Sure Master, bye!" You shake your head and follow the directions to security. It is deserted save for a panel of six monitors. To your horror each monitor has a clip playing, clips of Nagyung and you—Nagyung sitting in your lap, you facefucking Nagyung, you fingering Nagyung, you pounding Nagyung, Nagyung’s orgasmic expression as she cums, and finally, your cum leaking out of Nagyung and on to the desk. Taking your chance, you hurry to the computer, to see if you could delete or wipe the archives.

"So..." You jump at Hayoung's voice behind you. "Tell me, are these real or fake? Hmm? Are they fake or real? Are they not fake and therefore real, or are they not real and therefore fake? Well?"

"I umm, I, I..." you're struggling to process what she just said, something about real and fake. You tremble as she places a hand on your shoulder.

"Relax, tell you what, why don't we discuss this somewhere else, and then you can tell me whether this is real or fake." The grip on your shoulder tightens.

"Y-Yes Hayoung."

"Good, your place or mine?"

A/N: Slowly getting around to finishing this up, credit to Byakko who I shoot the shit with and came up with Nakko the app developer. Clearly the most unrealistic thing in this story is that she knows what a unit test is. Anyways thanks for reading, I just went ham with dumb metaphors and lots of random references lol

[wo8ngs]

⠀⠀⠀⠀︵𝜗℘︵　 ⠀⠀INTRODUCING INTERN!READER ...　　｡　 ⠀ ͜ ◞

top of her class. thrives on structure & is meticulously organized. never misses a deadline. always first to arrive and last to leave. always seen wearing mary janes, knee socks & black mini skirts. her desk is impeccably organized with colour-coded files, and everything is in its place. lover of all things minimalistic. ada wong's soon-to-be pretty little assistant.

TO WHO IT MAY CONCERN,

we are pleased to inform you that you have been selected for the internship position at wong & associates law firm for the fall term. after reviewing your application, we believe your skills and academic achievements make you an excellent fit for our team. your internship will commence on octoner 10 and is expected to run through december 21. during your time with us, you will be working closely with our legal team, gaining hands-on experience in corporate and civil litigation, and contributing to meaningful projects. we are confident this opportunity will provide valuable insights and allow you to further develop your legal expertise.

please confirm your acceptance of this offer by september 23 by clicking the button below. [confirm offer]

should you have any questions or need further information regarding the role or preparation for your start, do not hesitate to reach out. we look forward to welcoming you to wong & associates and are excited to work with you.

[blazehedgehog]

Be Aware

Back in December, I got an email from someone claiming to be Team Cherry, the developers of Hollow Knight. This "marketing liason" was offering me early access to the sequel/expansion, Silksong, to review.

A friend with connections to the game press quickly pointed out that the real Team Cherry wasn't sending out early access review codes and that they were actually warning users about impersonators on their "Contact Us" form. The email I received was a scam from someone looking to infect me with malware and/or steal my identity. (I wrote a twitter thread about it here)

About a month later, as I was wrapping up work on my "Definitive way to Play Sonic Adventure 2" video, I received another email, this one claiming to be someone from Frontier Foundry asking to sponsor an upcoming video for the release of "Deliver Us Mars." I told them I already had a sponsor for the Sonic Adventure 2 video, and after I was done, I was planning on taking a holiday. They got weirdly pushy with me, saying I could "make a short video" and put the brand deal there. I was too busy finishing the video, so I ignored them and moved on.

Now another month later, I find myself finishing a quick little video and thinking about that Frontier Foundry offer again, but upon looking at it with fresh eyes, it also was a clear and obvious scam. Just like with the fake Team Cherry offer, the person isn't listed as an employee at Frontier Foundry, the email they sent the offer from seems to be a personal email address that doesn't match who they said they were, and the "Contract" they tried to force on me was a huge Google Drive zip file that was password protected to prevent me from seeing what was inside before I downloaded it. The fact that they were so pushy with me suddenly started making a lot more sense.

As icing on the cake, I tried to ask the person for proof of identity, and in the month+ since we last talked to each other, their email address has been forcibly closed by Gmail.

If you're an up-and-coming content creator, please be careful and be aware of tactics like this. It's easy to get starstruck by the idea that you're special enough to get picked for a sponsorship deal or an exclusive beta, but always research WHO is sending you that email and NEVER be afraid to ask for proof of identity. Go over their heads and check with the employer they claim to be from if you need to.

Be smart, protect yourself, and stay safe out there.

[myfirstgamejam]

My First Game Jam 2024 is on!

The optional theme is: “Light”

Here’s a few tips and links to get the most out of the jam.

Make a dev log on the community!

A development blog is a blog in which a game developer or team talks about the process they’ve made over the course of the game’s creation. Maintaining a devblog keeps your audience in the know and helps facilitate productivity so you’ll have something to blog about. It also serves as a record of problems you encounter as well as the solutions you find for those problems.

Development logs are essentially the same thing, except we’ll be using the jam forums rather than a blog. However, you are free to use both the forums and your own blog as you develop your game.

Doing so is not necessary at all, but check out all the logs from last jam! In order to get the most out of your jam experience, it is vital that you interact with your fellow jammers and the community surrounding it. They’ll provide valuable feedback and support to help you along the way. So please, we encourage you to mingle, post in other logs, and of course post your own!

In addition, you are encouraged to add images and gifs. Here’s some programs to help facilitate that:

ScreenToGif

Licecap

Start your dev log today!

Respect your community!

Take a moment to review our code of conduct. We strive to create a safe, supportive, and productive environment, and we appreciate your efforts to make our community welcoming for everyone!

Post daily updates!

Post screenshots or fun mishaps to your dev log, twitter, tumblr, or your own blog to track your progress and get feedback. Tag your posts as #MyFirstGameJam so other jammers can find your work! To get the most exposure you can also tag #gamedev or #ScreenshotSaturday for Saturdays! Share your work and link back to your devlog to get feedback.

Manage your time and tasks!

We have a list of of useful time and task management tools for staying on top of your project. Set goals early and keep track of how fast it takes you to reach them!

Use our resources!

Still deciding on an engine? No problem. Check out this post to see what fits your project best or try the sortingh.at!

We have also started migrating our resource lists over to a new jam resources wiki! Here's some direct page links:

Unity resources

Godot resources

Gamemaker resources

RPGMaker resources

Ren'py resources

Twine resources

Free assets

Resources tag on blog

If you still have questions about the jam itself, take a look at our rules page!

Join the jam chat!

Want to share your work or ask for help? Or even just take a break from dev? Join discord chat here! (Please note you must be at least 14 years old to join!) Feel free to say hi and share your work! If you need help with a specific skill or engine, you can @/Unity or @/2D Art to notify mentors. If you think you would like to help other people with some part of games–join us as a mentor! You can get notifications when someone has a question about engines or skills you have expertise in!

Here’s a quick guide to how you can become a mentor.

Heed advice from previous jammers

This jam we took the time to write up a quick summary of advice from previous jammers: Know how to scope.

You can read about the number one game jam killer here!

Take care of yourself!

Game-making can be exhausting as well as rewarding! You are more important than your work, and we compiled a list of helpful tools for getting the most out of you!

Aaaand good luck!

Game dev can be exciting, frustrating, and extremely rewarding. We hope to give you the tools to help you succeed in your goals in the next two weeks!

[piosplayhouse]

Horse Isle 3: The Yandere Sim of Horse Games

(or, an extended study in how to hate your own playerbase as much as humanly possible)

(or, or, tldr there's pretty much no updated information on just how ridiculously bad this game is so here's a writeup on how I got banned and all the subsequent information I found during my time playing for documentation's sake)

Part I. The Backstory

My beloved followers will know that a few months ago I began playing Horse Isle 3, a horse-raising MMO surprisingly released in the year of our horse 2019 despite its 1997-era website and Runescape-esque graphics. Some of my play through (mostly just horse pictures) is chronicled in my tag #homophobic scum horse chronicles ¹ if you want to see how drippy my horses were before they killed me.

Now, don't get me wrong. I have endless respect for small teams of game devs that manage to create insanely impressive products-- which HI3's elaborate real-genetics breeding system, its main draw, certainly is. Coding is hard, modeling is hard, moderation is hard. Tip a coin to your local small indie teams that work hard to make incredible art.

However, HI3 is far from an admirable success story about a small dev team that triumphed over its obstacles.

The game is known for a variety of things, chief among them being the staff's rampant homophobia (which has earned it the moniker "the homophobic horse game"), hilariously uncharismatic mods (to the point where one of the main moderators, Connie, is mentioned by NAME in the majority of poor reviews of the game), the dev team's unrepentant rejection of criticism, and racism with a side of downplaying war crimes.

(Screenshots taken from Sitejabber, here)

Now, it's marketed as a game for ages 8+, which, as I've briefly talked about before, is unfortunately a rarity in today's hostile internet climate. I grew up on a variety of typical child friendly MMOs like ye olde Pixie Hollow and PetPet Park, and truly lament that so many of these have been shut down over the years. As such, I have no issue with strict rules or word filters in games, with the caveat that they are effective and genuinely intended to keep people safe. Kids are naive, and can and will say things that they shouldn't (I, for example, got kicked from a Minecraft server when I was 8 because I posted in chat that my mom told me sex wasn't a bad word. things happen). Filters are a very appropriate tool to aid manual moderation of chat features, especially in an environment where mistakes will be made.

However, HI3's, as shown below (words that are forbidden from chat are marked in red), are... questionably selective.

(Screenshot taken by Alice Ruppert, from here)

This appears to be attributed to the fact that along with having horrible moderators, HI3 also seems to have a remarkably horrible developer backend, which is a trend that you'll see pop up quite a lot in this post. Taken straight from the horse's (haha) mouth, the lead developer is the only person who seems to be able or willing to add to the filter list, and for whatever reason only wants to block the "most common inappropriate words"- because saying transgender is more of an issue than nazi and gulag I guess.

(Screenshot taken from Top R.'s Sitejabber review, here)

¹ I'm not sure how far this will reach out of my audience, and since people have already assumed weird stuff about me I thought I should probably clarify-- I'm not calling the game "homophobic scum" ghghg, my play through was focused on making horse versions of characters from a novel called "scum villain", so I took the scum and added horse (I actually have another tag for a different horse breeding game called "scum horse chronicles" so I needed to distinguish them easily but am not very good at tagging). That's it.

Part II. The Game

The game itself is, putting it simply, a mess at best and openly hostile towards newcomers at worst. The game's UI is comparable to your average petsite with 20 thousand things to click on but if you tried to navigate that while also watching the Pilgrim's Progress movie by Scott Cawthorn on 90% of your screen. This is a very good overview of what your experience first logging in will be like, with the added caveat that talking in global chat costs in game currency and that the game doesn't tell you this at ALL until you try to type in chat, and that depending when you log on it's entirely possible that you'll spawn into a completely dead town miles away from anyone who can help you, wilderness survivor-style.

To make things more complicated, information about the game is split between the game itself and the laughably horrible website/forums. Spectacularly enough, the forums, which provide vital game information and rule elaborations, cannot be searched in any way (not via Google or any hard-baked search bar) and are regularly purged by admins to erase evidence of scandals and poor moderation complaints.

Now, something you will find to be generally people's biggest issue with HI3 is their strict no "date-speak" rule, which sounds ok on paper but is worded *just* vaguely enough to give the moderators full jurisdiction over whether or not they think you're breaking the rules. Selective moderation is a major theme in the HI3 chronicle, but it is perhaps most documented with regards to this rule, because what the hell does "boyfriend/girlfriend talk" even mean?? Outside of vagueness, this rule has also been scrutinized extensively by others due to the fact that a pair of previous moderators were openly married with the igns "FrogLips" and "MrsFrogLips". I don't personally think this is super condemning, since kids usually address adults by Mr/Ms etc whether or not they know they're in a relationship, but regardless it's clear that the complete lack of elaboration on what this rule means can be easily manipulated to lodge any number of complaints against people.

(Screenshot from the Horse Isle website rules page, here)

What I will say, however, is that this rule would probably hold more water if the game wasn't literally about breeding horses.

You can pimp out your horses, you can pay others to breed your mares, you can put any number of special (real life currency-bought) amulets on your horses to make them more fertile/have twins/give birth faster. I paid $1000 to castrate Jiang Cheng. The word "stud" (which btw, is another word for a black butch lesbian) is used constantly. Perhaps most shockingly, horse inbreeding is very common and accepted among the community, to the point that it is explicitly mentioned and EXPLAINED in the game guide; the only penalization for it is that your incest product foal will have a lower intelligence stat. Call me old-fashioned, but I feel as though implementing and acknowledging that horses can breed with their own relatives is hmm perhaps more harmful than another player saying the word gay, but what do I know.

(Screenshot from the Horse Isle website game guide page, here (only accessible with an account))

Well, you might ask, after you breed and sell a horse, is there any way to put a brand on it so you know it's from your ranch? That's where the "prefix" system comes in. Prefixes are bolded titles that appear in front of a horses name in lists and in the overworld, and are described in the official game guide as follows:

(Screenshot from the same Horse Isle website game guide page as linked previously)

I think you can toggle them off if you don't want to see them, though I could be wrong. They're basically just 1-5 letter titles you can put on your own horses (nobody else's, importantly). There's no way to search prefixes, and you won't see them in game unless either a horse with a prefix is listed in auctions or you actually encounter someone in-game and see their horse.

In fact, I would learn later that not even the moderators monitor the prefixes, and apparently have no way to mass-delete them. At all.

(Image taken from an anonymous friend)

Now, it's not unusual that a game as complicated as HI3 would inevitably have a pretty taxing server-side code. Millions of multifaceted assets and features is really nothing to scoff at. However, the notion that your lead developer has to perform a manual search in the game's code to delete the equivalent of a stamp from every instance individually is hilarious. I'm not going to pretend to be a game developer, but there HAS to be a better way of coding a feature that intakes user-generated content that should probably be monitored regularly than that, right? Or, at least, there should be a robust filter system that could prevent any issues from occurring before they would need to be fixed so tediously. You might think.

On December 29th, 2022, I discovered how to register a prefix. It's very common to headcanon the characters I was naming my horses after as transgender, and I thought it would be cute to attach "TRANS" to my horses as a nod to this. However, a filter blocked the word. I was disappointed, but not surprised², and then tried to think of another word that was under 5 letters. To my complete and gay surprise, "GAY" was not filtered out, and henceforth, this worked as my prefix.

As you can see on the popup here, there are scant guidelines for what the requirements for a prefix should be. And, in this moment of apparently utter foolishness, I was under the impression that since "GAY" was NOT filtered out despite there clearly being a filter on this function, it was ok to register. Possibly it's not filtered because it's a synonym for "happy", I thought, which is also cute because I do like when horses are happy. Perhaps the staff had learned from their past criticism and had loosened the restrictions slightly because they felt restructuring was appropriate now that gay marriage is legal in the US, I imagined.

(My original post)³

What I could not imagine, however, was that the only reason the word wasn't filtered out, despite being possibly the most common sexuality-related word, was just because the lead dev couldn't be assed to add it to the filter list. And that apparently I was supposed to know this because it would lead to a permanent ban on my second offense with no warning.

² Hence typing "eat shit lol". Admittedly childish of me, but I didn't put a lot of thought into the post because it was just part of a casual silly live blog I was doing to blow off steam. The "if I get banned" tag surprisingly was not referencing "GAY", as I genuinely thought I was in the clear for that for reasons stated above, but because I tried to register "TRANS" and then posted about it online. You don't have to believe me, but I feel the need to defend myself since some people have wildly extrapolated that my actions were malicious instead of just a split second decision I made because I was bored one morning.

³ Despite the pop-up box saying that prefixes cannot be removed, they actually can at any time, given only that the person that owns the prefix unregisters the horse from it. The unregistering mechanic is for whatever reason not told to the player upon registering the prefix, but is mentioned in the official game guide linked above.

Part III. The Ban, The Report

I will preface this section by saying that I played the game normally. I do like being outrageous sometimes for my followers' entertainment, but I really don't like dragging random people into my antics if they aren't interested. Because of this, I really didn't interact with other players unless we were mutuals on some other platform. I rarely used the chat feature except to participate in server-wide events that required team participation, and I typically just explored on my own for fun. In general I think I was a pretty ok player, objectively, which lines up with my user trust score.

You see, the way moderators of HI3 allegedly keep track of rule breaking is through a "user trust score" with points added if you use features in the game, help people, etc, and points deducted if you violate rules. Anecdotally I've heard that around the -10 total points mark is when moderators put you on a sort of list to be monitored for suspension or punishment, which is pretty reasonable.

By the time I was banned, I had a score of +31. The -10 offset was a part of this debacle. The only thing I had ever done in the game which warranted any kind of violation was, as you will soon see, literally just naming about 30 of my own horses "GAY", a sin egregious enough to apparently offset about 200 hours worth of playtime with no issues.

Because of this, I was a little bit confused on multiple levels. For one, I had never even seen a moderator in game, nor been informed of discipline at any time before. On top of that, their permanent ban notification is extremely strange and vague. The text pop up when you try to log in just reads "Account currently banned -1 minutes ().", which is probably just copied straight from the server-side code for things and just wasn't translated into user-side comprehensibility. You'll also notice there is a "()" section in the notification, which I would assume is where they put the reason for bans, except for the fact that mine was completely blank.

The website which allegedly would hold more info just repeated a near identical code: "BANNED! -1min. Reason:".

So, with nothing else to go off of, I messaged support on the jankiest help center submissions I've ever seen on a website with this:

"Insisting" and "total disregard" are very strong words to use for a situation in which I just typed a word into a textbox because the game let me, I'd think, which is why I tried to reason with her. The prefixes mentioned in my message are well-known amongst the userbase and are much older and wider-spread than mine, so I would think that there would be at least some sort of precedent for this. The "geldings and yearlings" reasoning was mostly a joke, but also intended to express that the nature of an acronym (as the majority of prefixes seemed to be) is that it can be interpreted in many ways. Intent was thrown around a lot when I was discussing the issues of prefixes with other users, and it seemed to have been used to excuse previous behavior in situations where mods liked the users in question better.

I also cannot emphasize enough how much they did not warn me about my prefix being removed. When I logged in and saw my horses' names did not include it, I was suspicious that the moderators removed it just because of the history of their behavior. However, I had no hard evidence because they did not inform me at ALL. Not through in-game mail systems, not through server messages, not through the website. Complete radio silence except for the addition of an unexplained "-10" to my user score. I did complain to some people that I thought it was removed, but a combination of things suggested that it wasn't a huge deal, so I mostly let it lie. For one, I had over 100 hours of playtime and was mildly worried that one of my chat messages had been flagged without my knowledge. For another, my profile text had also mysteriously disappeared, probably because of a glitch, so who knows what could happen in this game. Lastly, I went to the prefix registry again just to check and hilariously enough, they didn't actually block "GAY" from the database. Yeah, they apparently individually deleted it from all of my horses, but couldn't be assed to add such an "inappropriate" word to their filter system.

So I just registered it again and publicly told people that I would do it again if the mods didn't actually tell me to stop. I didn't really care about the prefix because to me, the feature was purely cosmetic. All I wanted was transparency from the staff.

Well, anyway, I assume Connie couldn't think of a comeback, so she just closed my report. I was annoyed because quite literally none of my questions were answered and she didn't even refer to anything in specifics. It would take less than 1 second to type the number of the rule I violated, but I guess that was too much work for her.

I tried to give them as many outs as possible to just apologize about poor communication, but they didn't even take the bare minimum. I would also like to mention that this support ticket process is the ONLY way to directly communicate with any staff. There's no ability to upload files or images on this system, and no email listed that you could contact. So essentially, there's no way to give actual evidence for anything you say even if you want to.

Kat, who is known as the slightly-more-reasonable-but-still-pretty-bad mod then picked up the case. Her response actually provided specific information, which made it leagues above Connie's, but still included some very strange elements for sure.

The notion that this game is intended for a worldwide audience is especially funny to me because you would really think if they cared about other countries they wouldn't violate their own rule one by using a slur for Europe's largest ethnic minority, but ok. It's a weird hill to die on considering how USA-dominated the staff's opinions towards rules are (Connie justifies the usage of a slur for Rromani people based off the opinion of a single roommate she had who reclaimed it, Joe defends a store in-game being called "The Gulag" because Americans don't think gulags are that bad (discussed and cited in the conclusions section)). But then again, picking and choosing what parts of other countries' customs you want to respect is very American, which is why I think they should add an extra star rating for its patrioticness on the website.

As I mentioned before, the prefixes I included in my response are definitely older and more commonly-used than mine, so I'm not sure how they wouldn't have seen them before. This comment also ties back to the suggestion that the moderators have very little control or insight over a distinct feature of their game, which is not a great thing to admit so casually.

Kat has a strange habit of immediately contradicting herself in the same paragraph, as can be seen here. "The glitches never happen and bugs were quickly fixed, but games still have bugs". "People that break the rules usually write in to ask what was wrong, but most people usually never ask". At this point I think we can confidently say that they don't even make an attempt to proofread any of their responses, to be honest.

Her 7th paragraph has one of my favorite lines in this exchange. "If we had to notify players every time we made moderator changes to their account we would spend 24 hours a day" is giving huge Yandere Dev "stop emailing me because I have to spend 24 hours a day reading all my emails instead of coding" energy. You really have to wonder why these people that seem to hate moderating so much are moderators.

You can tell by my response, but I do not like the use of "most" and "usually" in this at all. What's your standard isn't others' standards, and this is a topic which needs to be navigated gently, especially when kids are concerned. I never played the previous Horse Isles. I had no experience with the mod team, or with violations, or with anything because no one bothered to take five seconds to send me a message. No, I did not know that you would permaban me for typing a word that's in one of the most popular traditional Christmas songs in a place were only people who interacted with me would be able to see it. Most games would not do this. To take a lackadaisical approach to your literal job of community management because you want people to moderate themselves is contradictory to your claims of keeping children safe.

I will admit I was being a bit cheeky here as a subtle hint that perhaps they should take feedback, but I also would have taken a genuine response. I try my best to be as polite as possible to tech support staff because not everyone is! But they're people too and a simple thank you is worth a lot in customer service, even virtual. But Kat... you're not really giving me anything to work with here! If anyone reading this has feedback for how I could've rephrased things, feel free to comment them honestly. I actually ran drafts of these messages through a few people before sending them to make sure I was as concise and polite as possible, even if support clearly wasn't interested in reciprocating the effort ("following out rules using the the GAY to begin with"...?).

Part IV. The Backlash

I won't go too into depth in this section because it's more personal than documentarian, so feel free to skip to the next section if you want!

After this, the girlies were not happy with me. The one saving grace of HI3 that I've heard pop up over and over again is that the community is great. And a lot of users are! Don't think I'm disparaging people who play the game because I'm not-- it's a really fun experience with the right people. I was in a Discord server with a lot of people who were extremely helpful and kind.

However, within the community, there's also a pervasive culture of silence. According to Alice Ruppert of The Mane Quest, a lot of people will refuse to go public with their complaints about the staff due to fear of retribution, which I feel is unfortunate but understandable. There's a pressure to shut up and eat your food lest you be seen as someone causing controversy for the sake of it and ruining the sanctity of the game, which is an attitude explicitly encouraged by the staff (discussed more in the next section).

I liveblogged my entire correspondence with the support team to a group of other players for the 2 days I talked to them, and did have a lot of acceptance from people who appreciated someone speaking out. After the 2020 Mane Quest article, public information had sort of just gone dark as the community was pushed further into niche seclusion, despite things not improving at all. However, towards the end of my messaging, a group of people that I had never even spoken to or seen online before accused me of a variety of things ranging from "displaying my sexuality to children" (note: all I ever did was name my horses "GAY". I never once talked about my own sexuality in-game, nor did I say the word in chat ever) to "joining the server to cause drama" to "mocking the lgbt community by throwing around the word gay" (actually I'll attach a picture of this one even though I don't want to put people on blast in this section just because its so funny).

I think most of this can be attributed to the game having gained such a notoriety that longtime players, especially those with strong nostalgic feelings, have become completely desensitized to it. And this compounds with the fact that the game is so niche it doesn't yet have a good alternative to turn to to create a toxic cocktail where people tell themselves that they have to be loyal to the staff to play this one of a kind game-- and that anyone who doesn't follow them just doesn't understand. It's really sad, honestly.

Part V. Conclusions

I don't necessarily think the devs of HI3 are legitimately consciously homophobic-- unfortunately LGBT rights are still controversial amongst the largely southern and rural population of horse enthusiasts, and I could understand if they felt it necessary to skim the line towards conservatism to maintain a userbase. It's cowardly and dumb but it's not a sin to do what you have to do to survive in a capitalistic hellscape as cutthroat as the game industry.

However, what I do think the devs are is power-hungry and hypocritical. They have failed at every turn at community management because they're unwilling to admit they make mistakes, instead choosing to issue non-apologies like "[we] regret you guys got so upset and did not realize neither our true intentions nor motivations nor the whole situation [that we said it's ok that a player has a shop called The Gulag because it's 'not direct or violent']". To respond this way to a userbase filled allegedly with young children as a fully grown adult with a wife and kids is laughably out of touch. 'Sorry your fee-fees were hurt by our adult moderator responding to a serious complaint about inappropriate user-generated content with "lol", but actually you just misunderstood us and we're going to ban anyone who brings this up again' is the sort of response you'd see from the teenage mod team of an Undertale amino, not the supposedly responsible head dev of a 'rare oasis of kid friendly content'.

Telling an audience of impressionable kids that the fact that their feelings are hurt is their fault for not intuiting the intentions of 40+ year old adults is unbelievably toxic, and it's no wonder why people are so nostalgia-bound to feverishly shut down criticism about the games. They've been guilt-tripped into believing the mod team can do no wrong and any controversy, even if valid, that springs up is just extrapolated by people that haven't been laboriously groomed to know what the mod team wants to hear.

Countless times throughout my time researching and playing the game, the number one advice I've heard has always been "suck up to the mods or they won't do anything for you". It's crystal clear that the moderators care more about the joy they get from having power over some 200 users who will kiss their ass if they say a buzzword more than they care about you, your child, or the game itself.

It's essentially a model scam Kickstarter's wet dream, a game propelled to release and popularity by its singular defining feature and left to fester on the shelf as the only game in its niche market. Because of this, I believe there's truly no better way to describe HI3, with its messy backend, refusal to improve, narcissistic moderators, broken features, poor visuals, and inefficiency than as the Yandere Simulator of horse games.

[askagamedev]

What do you do when you are at work but for whatever reason you have to wait to keep working (development breaking bug that is being fixed by other people, code compiling, waiting on person working on X thing you need so you can start work on Y, etc)

You're talking about downtime. Whenever I have downtime I try to be productive if I can, but the type of downtime determines what I can do. There's two main types of downtime - when my workstation is still usable and when it isn't.

If my workstation is still usable (e.g. the build is broken but I can still look at code/script/assets/etc.) then I notify my team that I've got some bandwidth and downtime to help out as a second set of eyes on any tasks my team might need help with. I can do code, design, or asset reviews for teammates and I can look over the various Slack discussions on other in-progress bug fixes and features to comment if I feel like I can contribute something helpful. I might not be able to run the game to test or validate anything, but I can still contribute my skill and knowledge to others who aren't having downtime.

If my workstation is unusable (e.g. all system resources are dedicated to building the game, building assets, compiling a level/lighting/etc., network or VPN down, etc.) then I really can't do much. I can't do reviews or join those conversations. In those situations I've traditionally done things to pass the time like listen to music or a podcast, scroll through social media, or think about what to write next on the blog. More recently, I've been focusing on leaning away from the social media scrolling and being more mindful so I have been taking the opportunity for mental and emotional "digestion" by not focusing on anything external and allowing my mind to process the normal emotional experiences in my life. It was difficult to start, but has definitely helped with my focus and my attention since I've started doing it.

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[kurumeki]

The satisfaction today!!!

I was having a tech issue with our database and database developers were like "noo it can't be code is perfect you're using it incorrectly" and I fought back that I know it's incorrect.

2 months passed, we went through shitload of calls to explain what I mean and what they see in the code. Yes I sat with them reviewing the code, totally not my job but I needed to prove my point.

AND TODAY WE FOUND THE BUG. It's been there THE WHOLE TIME. And they're like "oh shit you're right". Whole functionality of the app working on totally incorrect assumption. My head hurt after looking at the code but goddamn I can do anything if I have to help my team.

[love-fictional-men]

Save a Horse, Ride a Statesman

Chapter 1: First Day

Summary: You just landed the job of your dreams, working IT at the revered Statesman organization. Even better, Agent Whiskey asks for your help inputting case files for your special project.

Warnings: daddy kink, age gap, power dynamics, power imbalance, lots of smut, unprotected sex, oral (both receiving), PinV.

Word Count: 3698

You take a deep breath, and look up at the large, reflective building towering above you. You can’t believe you’re here, moving across the country to New York for a new job at a prestigious espionage organization. A part of you doubted if you even deserved to be here, but your qualifications spoke for themselves. This felt like a dream come true. You rang the brass bezeled door bell and the doors immediately open.

“Come on in, take the elevator to the top floor and meet us in the conference room straight ahead,” a familiar, feminine voice projects over the intercom.

You take the elevator to the top floor, and as the doors open you make your way directly to the conference room. You open the doors, and see Ginger Ale, the woman you had your first interview with, gives you a smile and pats the seat next to hers. A man with a cowboy hat, suit and glasses sits at the head of the table, along with hologram projections of other men dressed in a similar fashion. You make your way over to Ginger and take a seat.

“It’s so nice to meet every one of you, and I just want to say it’s been an honor being selected to join your team,” you state, attempting to hide your nervousness.

“I hope to aid making Statesman the most effective counter-terrorism organization in all the world,” you declare. The man at the head of the table looks at you with warm, soft welcoming eyes and smiles before saying,

“Well sugar, it’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m Agent Whiskey, but you can call me Jack. Why don’t you go on with tellin’ us your plans to optimize Statesman?” You feel your breath leave your body after briefly admiring his warm brown eyes,

“Actually, my code name is Grenadine but you can call me (y/n),” you say with a smile. You always hated older men addressing you by anything other than your name, especially in front of your constituents. Being a woman in tech, you learned how to navigate these situations tactfully. After a brief pause you open you stand up and all eyes are on you. You notice Agent Whiskey quickly look you up and down before readjusting his eyes toward your face. You clear your throat to speak.

“I plan, with the help of all of you, to review case files dating back as far as possible. I developed an algorithm to review areas of success and opportunity. This will aid Ginger Ale in creating tools to succeed in further missions. I need to review everyone’s case files. They’ll be imported into a new data base and analyzed. Patterns and trends will be created. Ginger and I will be able to review these trends and create more advanced tools to aid agents in the field.” You sit back down and place your hands on top of one another, and lean back a smidge. Ginger gives you a brief smile before asking,

“Does anyone have any questions about Grenadine’s project?”

Jack, lifting his fist away from his chin, turns his chair to you and Ginger.

“And just how secure is this data base darlin?” Again with the pet names, but there’s something about him that makes it permissible. Maybe it’s his sweet southern drawl. Perhaps its his strong, large hands and broad nose. Whatever it is, you cannot deny that Agent Whiskey has an intoxicating effect. He’s smooth, sweet and warm, just like his code name. You resist the urge to consume any more of his charm, attempting to stay sober in front of your peers.

“It’s all stored locally on servers in a secure location. I’ve coded several firewalls that will alert those on a need to know basis if there’s any detection of infiltration. At that point, the entire system will be wiped,” you respond. The holographic Statesmen around the table appear impressed, but Jack doesn’t change his stern facial expression.

“That’s a mighty fine kill switch you got there Miss Grenadine, but ain’t it gonna defeat the purpose if all this information is lost?” Jack asks, without breaking eye contact.

“It won’t be lost, we aren’t destroying the original documents. Those will live in secure locations. I doubt anyone would be willing to physically break into a Statesman’s office to rifle through file boxes like it’s the 70s. And even if they do,” you say, warmly smiling at him, “they’d be caught between in-between a Statesman’s lasso.” The men around the table chuckle, and Jack gives you a slight smile and nod of approval. Champ, the man who gave your final interview and congratulated you on joining Statesman, speaks up. “Now we got a lot of old timers, myself and Whiskey included, who wrote down files on pen and paper. Is that gonna be a problem Grenadine?” You prepped yourself for this question, knowing Statesman had been active since the early 1900s.

“Not at all Champ! You see, I’ve developed a secure application accessible only on Statesman hardware that can translate handwriting to text and import it on the secure algorithm. Even if it can’t, I can review any files and manually input any missing information,” you state with sheer confidence. Champ looks at you and grins,

“Well, good luck translating Whiskey’s hand writing,” Champ quips, and the rest of the room bellows with laughter.

A few more Statesmen ask you questions. You gladly answer without missing a beat. Eventually, the meeting adjourns and the holograms sign off. You stand up from your seat and make your way to the door with Ginger. Agent Whiskey speaks,

“Miss Grenadine, would you mind hangin back for a spell. I just got some more questions.” Ginger looks at you, grabs your wrist and whispers in your ear, “Be careful with that one (y/n).” You gulp, take a deep breath and walk toward him.

“Now sugar, Champ ain’t kiddin’ when he said my writing was God awful,” Jack says with a chuckle. You slightly giggle, and sit down next to him, ignoring the knot growing in your lower abdomen.

“It’s okay Agent Whiskey I-” you say before he cuts you off.

“Sweetheart, I already said you can call me Jack,” he says, leaning closer to you. You feel heat rush to your face,

“Sorry Jack. Like I said in our briefing, I don’t mind transcribing older files manually. Just give me the files and I can take care of it at my desk.”

“Miss Grenadine, I don’t want to burden you with my chicken scratch notes. Would’t it be faster…easier if you came by my office and we reviewed them together?” Ginger’s words of caution rung in your ear, but your heart pounded at the mere idea of being alone with the most attractive Statesman. Was he flirting with you? Or was this just his demeanor? Maybe he was trying to help a newcomer make a name for themselves in this organization? After all, he is technically your boss and what kind of boss wouldn’t want his subordinate to succeed? You take a deep breath.

“That sounds like a fantastic idea Jack. I’d love to get your help and your input on previous missions would greatly benefit my knowledge of Statesman,” you say attempting to sound professional.

“Alright, alright Miss. Meet me in my office around, say, six o clock?” He lets out a deep breath, stands up, and you do as well. You extend your right arm out to shake his, and he firmly, yet gently grasps yours. His large, warm hand engulfs yours and you can’t help but feel a surge of excitement rush throughout you. Breaking away, you leave the conference room and head to the roof top to get some fresh air.

From the rooftop, you can see New York City in all its glory. This feels like a dream come true. Your first day appeared to be a success, you gained respect from the Statesman, and now your handsome boss wants to make sure you get this project up and running. You call your best friend from back home to share the news. After the initial pleasantries, you say to her,

“Oh and get this! Head of the New York office wants me to work with him personally to get to input his information into the new data base I created.”“That’s amazing (y/n)! It seems like you made a really great impression. I always knew you’d do great things. I can’t believe you're working for one of the best distilleries in the US,” she says. Smiling, and looking down at your shoes you mention,

“It also doesn’t hurt that he’s one of the hottest guys in the office.”“Really? Well don’t get a reputation on your first day,” she jokes.

“What’s he look like?” She asks.

“I think he’s from Texas? He’s got a whole cowboy thing going. He’s got brown hair, brown eyes. He’s older too. Totally got a daddy vibe,” you say, feeling that heat rise up to your face again.

“Daddy? Like he’s got kids?”

“No, I mean… well I don’t know. Look I’ll explain it to you later. Gotta go!” You end the call. Little did you know, Jack was behind one of the structures listening in on your conversation. A smile grows wide on his face.

The rest of the day is spent touring the facilities with Ginger, getting to know the equipment and familiarizing yourself with different programs. As exciting as this is, you’re looking forward to tonight more. You try to push back this growing crush to the back of your mind, and focus on absorbing all the interfaces and layouts Statesman has to offer. After all, you’re here to work. Luckily, the day goes by quick and before you know it almost everyone is leaving the office… Everyone except you and Jack.

“Hey Grenadine, wanna share a taxi back home?” Ginger asks. “Oh I’m staying a little later to work on the algorithm project,” you say. Ginger glances away from you, observing Jack’s office with the lights still on. “Ok, just remember what I said earlier and Grenadine?” “Yes Ginger?”

“Don’t work too hard, it's only your first day.”“Good thing I’m on salary,” you joke. She laughs, and bids you a good night.

After seeing the elevator close behind her, you make your way to Jack’s office and knock on the door.

“Well hello gorgeous,” he declares and motions you into his spacious office, furnished with a warm rosewood desk, luxurious rugs and two cozy looking leather seats. You tell yourself he’s just a gentleman, and respond,

“Hello Agent Whiskey, thanks for taking the time to help me with this,” you say trying to sound as professional as possible.

You take a seat across from his on the other side of his desk. He hands you a stack of old, dusty files and Champ wasn’t kidding. This handwriting was a challenge to decipher. You begin shuffling through the papers, and start scanning the documents into your Statesman tablet.

“Hey Whiskey. I got most of this mission inputted, but I’m having trouble making out the location. Could you take a look?” You pass the paper to his side of the desk, and his hand grazes yours and you instinctually jerk back a tad. He looks up at you and grins,

“Now sweet pea I don’t bite,” he says with a chuckle. “You ain’t gotta be scared of old Jack.” The heat rises to your cheeks and you look down at your now empty hands.

“I didn’t mean to come off like that Jack, I’m just nervous since its my first day and all. I guess there’s a reason you’re out in the field and I’m in the office,” you look up at him with your big, beautiful doe eyes. You can see his pupils widen, and he reaches for your hands and begins to stroke them. A surge of excitement rushes through your body as you notice his large hands engulf yours.

This is a mistake, I should go. I should have known this would happen. I should have listened to Ginger. You think to yourself. You’re drunk on Whiskey. You understand the ramifications of sleeping with your boss, but the tingling in your lower parts is too much to handle.

“I like your hands Jack,” you finally say, with your thumb stroking the back of his hand.

“(Y/n), there’s a lot of parts I like about you. Permission to speak freely?” He asks, with his strong, brown eyes piercing yours.

“Yes…Jack.” You feel your face get hot, and you let out a deep breathe.

“I ain’t been able to get you out of my mind since I met you in the conference room,” he confesses in his southern drawl.

“Jack, you’re my boss. I’ve always dreamed of working for such a rivered organization like Statesmen and I don’t want to throw this all away based on a lapse in judgement.”“It don’t have to be that way darlin’,” he says. Jack pulls your hand toward him and plants a kiss on it while looking you deep into your eyes. He moves his lips away from the back of your hand, looks up at you and says,

“Besides, don’t think I didn’t hear what you called me on the phone earlier,” he smirks. Your stomach tingles into your vulva. You let out a deep breathe, and begin to squeeze your legs together.

“Aww sweetheart, look what I’m doin’ to you,” he teases.

“I can’t,” you whine. “It’s not right,” you say with your eyes watering out of frustration.

“Honeybee, don’t get upset. Why don’t you sit on daddy’s lap so you can see what you’re doin’ to him?” Any self control you attempted to muster is completely gone. You know you should leave, in order to preserve your reputation, but you can’t. You get up and make your way to Jack, he grabs your wrist and pulls you down onto his lap. His growing member pushes through his jeans and onto your ass. He grabs the sides of your face and pulls you in for a kiss. His mustache tickles your lips as his tongue dances with yours. You begin to move your hips back and forth, desperate to feel him.

“Now that wasn’t so hard, now was it?” He teases you again. His hands make their way down your frame. You move your legs from the side of the chair and straddle his hips.

“Oh Jack you feel so good,” you let out as your skirt opens and the fabric of your panties grind against the denim outline of his cock.

“Yeah baby girl? You like feelin’ my cock rub against sweet little pussy of yours?” He asks you, taking your top off and throwing it across the room. You let out a breathy “Yes.” He starts massaging your breasts then unclasps your bra, exposing your hard nipples. Cupping your right breast with his hand, he puts his mouth to your nipple and gently moves his tongue in a swirling motion. You grab the shoulders of his blazer and slide it off his rugged body, clasping his forearms as you do so. Then, you grab the bottom of his shirt and begin pulling it off of him, knocking his cowboy hat off. You wrap your arms around him and his mouth meets yours. You can feel his warmth as you two make out. You grab his biceps and rub your hands down them as you kiss each other. You slide down from his lap and onto your knees, looking into those dark, beautiful eyes. Your eyes move down to his silver belt buckle with the engraved Statesman logo.

“Daddy… Can I?” You ask sweetly.

“Baby girl I’d be a god damn fool if I said no,” he responds. Eagerly, you begin to unclasp his belt, and pull down his jeans with his boxers attached. You are amazed watching his cock spring out, hits his belly before staring right at your face. You start to lick the base, moving your tongue up to the tip swirling your tongue around it.

“Darlin’ don’t tease me like that. Show me what a good girl you can be,” he sighs. You put one arm on his thigh, the other at his base and begin taking his length in your mouth. His size is impressive, and grows more as you inch your mouth around it. You relax your jaw, and breathe through your nose as it travels deeper and deeper down your throat. He pushes the back of your head down until your mouth reaches the base of his cock. You look up at him, eyes watering, as his pupils almost engulf his iris. The hand on the back of your head begins bobbing you back and forth as Jack fucks your mouth. You arch you back.

“Now that’s a good girl,” he remarks. He moans with each thrust as your fingers dig into his thigh.

“God damn sugar that mouth is made for me,” he says as he pulls you away from his cock. He bends down, picks you up and places you on his desk facing him. He pulls you in for another kiss and you groan with excitement. He pulls your panties and skirt down to the floor.

“Daddy’s gonna make you feel real nice honey,” he says locking eyes. He grabs both of your knee caps and pushes them away from each other, exposing your sex. He pushes his index finger in you and you whimper, he pulls it out and then pushes two fingers in, twisting around causing you to squirm.

“Oh Jack I want you so badly,” you let out.

“(Y/N) you got me,” he says beginning to pump his fingers more rapidly. His lips make his way down your heat, and begins licking you while his fingers fuck you. You let out several groans. His free hand spreads your folds and his tongue circles around your bud. The fingers that are inside you begin to curl upward and hit your special spot.

“Oh fuck Daddy, keep doing that,” you pant, looking up at him worshipping your body. Encouraged, he picks up his pace and you begin to shake while letting out breathy “yeah”s over and over. The pressure builds up and you let out a long moan, throwing your head back onto the desk. Your body is shaking and your breathing shallow. Jack towers above you and grins,

“Babygirl you taste sweeter than molasses.” He leans down and kisses your lips while positioning himself at your entrance.

“You ready to take Daddy’s cock?” You look down and adjust yourself closer to him. Your back arches, perking up your breasts. He stands back up, and strokes your thighs.

“Jack please go slow,” you tell him, hinting it’s been a while.

“The last thing I wanna do is hurt my little girl,” he says.

“(Y/N), tell me if you want me to stop. You hear me?” He asks, gazing into your eyes and brushing his hand against your cheek.

“I promise,” you respond.

“‘I promise’ what?” He asks sternly.

“I promise Daddy.” You grab his hand, and lace your fingers with his. His tip enters you and you can already feel his width stretch you. He exits you, then enters you again deeper, this time halfway. You feel your walls sweating and your hips buck forward to meet his cock. With this encouragement, he enters you half way. You let out an audible gasp, followed by a moan.

“Keep going Jack, I can take it,” you say looking up at him.

“Thatta girl,” he smiles. He thrusts deeper into you, entering you fully. He lets out a “fuck” under his breath which you follow with a moan. His rhythm is slow and steady and you can feel him stretch you. You lock eyes with him, grab his free hand and put his fingers in your mouth. You begin to suck them, he lets out a groan and begins to fuck you faster. He pulls his fingers out of your mouth and grabs your hips. You moan while putting your hands over his.

“You like that baby girl? You like being full of daddy’s cock?”

“Yes Daddy Whiskey,” you coo. He smiles, releases his hands from you and orders, “Open that pretty little mouth.” He sticks his finger down your throat, pulls it out covered in your saliva and beings vigorously rubbing your clit. Your thighs shake and you start panting heavily.

“Daddy please,” you let out and he fucks harder. He grabs your throat with his free hand and your thighs wrap around his waist. You whimper as he pounds into you, his finger pressing harder on your bud.

“Cum on daddy’s cock sweet thing,” he commands. You shake and let out a muffled moan. He pulls out of you and sits on the leather chair behind you. He pats his lap,

“Go on, show daddy what you got,” he commands. You stand up from the desk, legs shaking like a new born foal. You position yourself above him, he grabs your face and kisses you passionately. You break away and take a deep breathe.

“Save a horse, ride a statesman,” you giggle. He smiles with a chuckle,

“Baby girl you’re perfect,” he says. Your hips move down, and you begin to motion your hips back and forth, riding his cock as if your life depended on it. You feel his balls slap against the area between your sexes. You let out a few squeaks and moans, your tits bouncing in his face as he kisses them. He starts breathing heavier,

“Daddy’s gonna come,” he exhales. He starts to push you off, but you saddle back on his hips. His eyes widen, he lets out a deep groan and shoots his load into you. You can feel his seed shoot into you and you let out a gasp. You get off of him, kissing him softly.

“I’m gonna have to keep you around baby girl,” Jack says as he embraces you.