#Date Night in Berlin

[robwrecks]

If there's no pics, then we at least get a story.

[tempest-melody]

Berlin: Dinner at the TV Tower

[wonryllis]

✶ 𝐁𝐀𝐁𝐘𝒟𝐎𝐋𝐋? RICH BOY ENHYPEN PINNING AFTER YOU.

目录──────𝗔𝗟𝗧𝗘𝗥𝗡𝗔𝗧𝗜𝗩𝗘𝗟𝗬, 𝗐𝗁𝖾𝗋𝖾 𝗒𝗈𝗎'𝗋𝖾 𝗍𝗁𝖾 𝖽𝗂𝖺𝗆𝗈𝗇𝖽 𝗈𝖿 𝗍𝗁𝖾𝗂𝗋 𝖾𝗒𝖾𝗌.

𝓉𝗵𝗲 𝗪𝗢𝗥𝗟𝗗 𝗦𝗧𝗔𝗚𝗘 ⋅ enhypen showing that you're not just one of the girls. wordcount total 2882 (approx 0.4k each) ⭑ CONTAINS— female!reader, fluff, suggestive, lots of swearing. % strongly recommend listening to ›› the respective songs while reading! jungwon's is inspired by ␥ kavin and kaning. ( THE ARCHIVE? ) PLS REBLOG ><

𝗟𝗘𝗘 𝗛𝗘𝗘𝗦𝗘𝗨𝗡𝗚

ぃ ⏤ now playing. HELLGIRL BY ARI ABDUL

"shit. you gotta wear this one, angel," heeseung groans in satisfaction, ignorant and indifferent to the fact that all the store employees could hear him, someone who never brings over girls to places like these, going insane over one. and the fact that you were unable to wrap your head around this situation just yet.

it was surreal and it was nerve wrecking. but heeseung was adamant that he needed you.

needed you to dress so fucking gorgeous and stand by his side as his date for the night while he paraded around greeting his parents' guests. showing them that he is capable of being committed by bringing along a partner for the first time ever. that's what he tells you—

"is this really fine?" you ask again, hands dusting over the sleek satin hugging your skin in a way that it tickled. heeseung stands up and strides overs to where you stand, arms sliding around your waist to pull you against him. "it's more than fine, absolutely stunning," leaning into your neck to leave kisses, "and so hot," right infront of everyone, no one daring to say a word to him, except you.

you who has been an exception to all his rules, you who has made him want to do things he has never wanted to before. you who has swept him off his feet.

you push against his chest in an attempt to stop him,"we'll be late, should go now," he hums in a low growl, lips nipping right against your ear before he pulls away with much exasperation almost unsated. clicking his tongue in annoyance for the staff to hurry the billing once he's done admiring you. unable to stand that anyone beside him see you dressed so pretty.

"just smile and follow my lead," heeseung tells you once you arrive at the venue. giving you an encouraging look as he instructs the valet to wait until you seem calm enough to step out. that's what he tells you— heart eyes and odd actions speaking for themselves. his hands find your waist when you finally walk up the stairs, breath shaky as you pass the entrance.

"relax angel, 'm right here, we can leave whenever you want," he kisses the side of your head, lips lightly touching your styled hair. never caring about who's looking and who's thinking what. if only you knew it too.

𝗣𝗔𝗥𝗞 𝗝𝗢𝗡𝗚𝗦𝗘𝗢𝗡𝗚

ぃ ⏤ now playing. STAY BY ARI ABDUL

"look behind you, princess," the voice incoming from your phone suddenly sounds too loud, paired with faint footsteps coming to a halt. jay's lips break into a wide smile when you turn around in an instant to look at him. your eyes following his hands holding an enormous bouquet of red roses, before you notice anything else.

before you notice the want in his eyes. the want for you.

"jay? i thought you were in— " you speak into the phone, eyes locked with his, but before you can finish he hangs up the call. approaching you with quick steps and immediately pulling you into a kiss. one that's short but deep enough to convey his feelings. "berlin? yeah, but i flew back for you," he breathes out against your lips.

"why?" "you know why love," his fingers twirl the hair falling into face, tucking them away and cupping your cheek as he gives you a smile before stepping away.

he waits for you to say something, to address his feelings but like always you avoid it and like always jay lets you. alas there will come a time when you would no longer be able to deny his love, so until then he will continue to show you all ways you own his heart in. his forever princess."what about that conference you were going to attend with your dad?" you ask, accepting his bouquet.

watching him with a soft giggle as he struggles to pull out a single rose and place it behind your ear. "don't worry about it," in a reassuring tone he leads you to his car. teasing you of a surprise each time you question where you are headed.

asking you to have your eyes closed while he leads you to the rooftop of a high-rise building owned by his family, illuminated by pretty lights and flowery wreaths, and a firework show worth a million.

all just for you.

to pose a smile on your face and to be the one to put it. to be the reason of your happiness and to be the person beside you in your best memories,"happy new year, princess," jay whispers into you ear as you open your eyes to see all of it. "jay this—" you gasp in a trance, gaze hooked on the sky while his is fixated in the way the fireworks shine against your pretty orbs and the gloss on your lips,"it's all for you,"

𝗦𝗜𝗠 𝗝𝗔𝗘𝗬𝗨𝗡

ぃ ⏤ now playing. MEDDLE ABOUT BY CHASE ATLANTIC

"you owe me. you can't keep avoiding me forever, doll," jake chuckles, noticing how you turn the other way after catching a glimpse of him. finding it adorable how you do everything you can to not cross paths with him.

leaving him no choice but to wait for you outside your university, leaning against his black lykan hypersport; attracting unwanted attention while his eyes only look for your cute panicked figure amidst the crowd.

"i told you it was a mistake—" you refute, throwing a glare at his smug face as he drives right beside you, following your every step, nonchalant about all the stares you both get as long as you agree to him taking you out. "get in the car," or the other way round, he's fine with both. frustrated and knowing you'd never be able to escape him, you decide to give in.

"you owe me lunch," jake grins as his eyes watch you get into the passenger seat just like the passenger princess you are.

his passenger princess. first and last in his beloved car.

"jake this— isn't this too—" your heart skips beats at the sight of the dock and the luxury cruise restaurant closing in, scared and nervous about how much you'd have to spend but jake just shushes you. getting out the car first and coming over to open the door for you; one hand holding yours and the other cushioning your head as you step out.

"just let me have your time and i'll let you off of staining my prada with coffee," he begs, afraid you'd walk out of here if he were to tell you the real reason. if he were to tell you that you have his heart and no matter what you do his feelings are not changing. if he were to tell you he wanted to take you out to all these places and spoil you rotten and occupy your mind like you occupy his.

if he were to tell you it was indeed not your fault for he bumped into you on purpose to find an excuse to talk to you.

"but—" jake shushes you again, fingers rubbing against your lips as he shakes his head before pulling out the chair for you and helping you sit properly,"don't think too much doll, just do as i say, please?" planning to keep you busy until the sun goes down so he can take you to for a ride on his yacht.

𝗣𝗔𝗥𝗞 𝗦𝗨𝗡𝗚𝗛𝗢𝗢𝗡

ぃ ⏤ now playing. BABYDOLL BY ARI ABDUL

"fuck baby, don't cry like that," sunghoon panics, his fingers grazing under your eyes to gently wipe the tears. afraid if he's not careful enough, he'll break you. "as much as i love the way you look so pretty like this, tears are not for someone like you," he has no idea how to soothe your frantically crying figure, slouched in the passenger seat against the expensive leather of his aston martin.

his hands fumble around in an attempt to think of ways he could just make you feel better and smile for him. those adorable crinkle of your eyes that have him whipped.

fuming each time he thinks of the moron who took that opportunity away from him by making you sad. he swears if he finds him, he'll beat the living daylights out of him. remind him not to linger anywhere around his girl.

sunghoon softly cups your cheek in his palm and leans in to kiss you, lips moving slow and sensual, "forget him, let me make you happy," he whispers into your mouth once he pulls away, foreheads touching and hands caressing your face lovingly. he makes sure your belt is secured before driving off to one of the luxury malls in the city, ones where you need to be of a certain level to enter.

a place you probably could never have the chance to enter if it weren't for him.

"my princess gotta shop her sadness out, hmm?" sunghoon coos as he stops outside the building, watching you gape in surprise, surprised himself that you are yet to realize just how much you mean to him.

"come on, i'll buy you whatever you lay your eyes on," he insists before you have the chance to deny him.

his hands rest at the back of your waist, leading you inside after handing his keys to the valet. dropping a soft kiss on your temple when you watch his vip card being inspected with a nervous breath of how elite this place has to be.

and knowing how new you must feel to all this, sunghoon pulls you closer with the intention of making it known that this is how it's gonna be from now, "get used to it, baby," you're not his yet but he's gonna treat you like you are. after all it's only a matter of time before it happens.

𝗞𝗜𝗠 𝗦𝗘𝗢𝗡𝗪𝗢𝗢

ぃ ⏤ now playing. GOOD GIRL BY THOMAS LAROSA

"good girl, you did a great job," sunoo pats your head teasingly amused at the confusion adorning your features. "sunoo, what were you doing there! you don't even have marketing?" the way you close in, demanding an explanation assures him that you indeed were affect by his presence, by the eye contact he held with you the entire time you were giving your presentation.

walking into the lecture hall in the middle of it as if he owned the place and taking a seat at a spot that directly put him in your line of sight. smirking, raising his brows and pushing his tongue against his cheeks to distract and annoy you.

"would you believe me if i said i came to see you?" his hands took ahold of your wrists playing with your fingers as he waited for you to answer.

"liar," you whisper, suddenly conscious of the implication behind his words and it makes him chuckle, of course what did he expect? you're hard to get, and perhaps that's the reason he feels so attracted, almost crazy over you.

like something he has to have, someone he has to have.

he takes a step closer, his varsity hat poking against the top of your head as his eyes bore into yours just the way they did inside earlier,"see? what do you want me to say then?" he whispers back, tone suddenly changing into a serious one. "you can't just enter any class like that," your innocent claim goes through him from one ear and falls through the other. how naive you are.

"i can if it's my dad's university," he can't help but chuckle at the expression on your face when you put the pieces together and realize it. all those times you came across him in places with strict attendance, it all made sense now.

"as adorably as you scold me, you're gonna see me everywhere you go," sunoo warns, leaning in impossibly close, lips hovering over yours,"you should stop fooling yourself baby,"

his hands move from your wrists to rest against the wall behind, voice dropping an octave,"and you should stop fooling around just because you can," you bite back, pressing your palm into his chest to push him back. "i'm fooling around because i want you, and i will have you," "you—" "we have a party this weekend at our summer villa, come with me?"

𝗬𝗔𝗡𝗚 𝗝𝗨𝗡𝗚𝗪𝗢𝗡

ぃ ⏤ now playing. SINNERS BY ARI ABDUL AND THOMAS LAROSA

"jungwon? what are you doing here? are you okay?" it makes jungwon happy to see you worrying about him, shoving his hands into the pockets of his pant as he watches you walk around the counter to his figure by the door. finding his cerulean blue chevrolet corvette 2lz parked in his usual spot, and him still dressed in the armani and hermès set you saw him in an hour ago when he dropped you off at your uncle's flower shop.

"mhm, just wanted to see my pretty girl again," he grins cockily once you realize there's nothing wrong and he's just trying playing around like always.

albeit to jungwon, it's never been a play and you have never been a toy.

this has been his way of showing you that you're not just another girl he's chasing after; because yang jungwon has never chased as opposed to what you think. and to harbour such deep and honest feelings that compel him to do what he has never done, that should have given you the hint by now. perhaps he'll just have to try a tad bit harder.

"how do you wear this?" he struts inside, passing by you to the space behind the counter you previously stood at, dangling a lone apron by his pinky and raising his brows at you, waiting. "your clothes will get dirty!" your attempts to curb him fall through for jungwon's persistence to stay with you holds like a strong wall, incapable of budging.

"i don't really care," jungwon's hands loop around the strings in a way that has the apron falling off making you giggle as you give in and just step in to help him,"idiot, that's not how you do it," you mumble.

and all he can think of is how he wants to be your idiot.

"how does this look? i think it looks so pretty on you," he says, putting a messy wreath on your head. to jungwon there's always flowers blooming everywhere you go, sweet scent overtaking all his scenes believing that's how you intoxicated him.

you slap away his hands in a shy chuckle that he doesn't understand, did he say something wrong? not aware and quite literally clueless of his own effect. by the time the sun sets down, you're asleep with your head down on the counter, facing him. and jungwon admires the way you looks so pretty, prettier than any flower.

𝗡𝗜𝗦𝗛𝗜𝗠𝗨𝗥𝗔 𝗥𝗜𝗞𝗜

ぃ ⏤ now playing. STUCKINMYBRAIN BY CHASE ATLANTIC

"riki?" oh. you're here? riki looks up at the sound of your footsteps getting closer, halting a metre away from him, like you always do, not too close, not too far and it drives him crazy. "what are you doing here?" you ask, confused to find him waiting outside your mundane apartment building with his out of place red ferrari sf90.

"uh, you left this in the car last time," he fumbles out a dior liquid blush, clearly brand new and a shade you have never used before.

"that's not mine," giggling, you walk over to the other side, opening the passenger seat door to fish out the gloss you actually did leave and waving it in the air to show him,"this is mine richboy," the soft sounds of laughter, your teasing voice.

his favorite thing in the world as of late.

you who has him smitten with infatuation, unable to get you off his mind no matter how much he tries. you who never gives him the answer he wants but never pushes him away either. you who makes him feel like a pathetic loser, you who makes him want to try as many times as he can to win your heart.

"it's a gift," he quickly improvises, wanting you to accept it, of getting a chance to give you something. "you're gifting me a blush?" you question and it throws him off, blush?,"wait, it's not a lipgloss— i, i had no idea, i have never—" riki swears, he really had no clue,"bought makeup?" he nods and it makes you burst into a fit of laughter again. it warms his heart, leaning against his car and watching you with eyes that speak volumes of his feelings.

feelings that anyone could notice, anyone but you.

he lets you revel in his silly naivety, content to know you are not longer sad as you were a few days ago.

"now this suits you pretty little face," he says once you seem to calm down, bewildered at his sudden compliment while he walks over to you.

cupping your face and caressing your cheeks,"so pretty," mumbling under his breath, loud enought to reach your ears,"it's boring when you cry, baby," his lips hover over your own as both of your heartbeats pick up in sync, breath getting caught up at the shift in the atmosphere. "let's go on a drive, we'll get you a bunch of pretty glosses to wear for me,"

TAGLIST ( open. ) @kangseulgithegreat @s00buwu @lilyuwon @pockyyasii @nctislifue @ashtxrie @miniature-tragedy @jayujus @brachives @thoughtsmeander2tumblingblindly @eeunoia @nxzz-skz @shawnyle @potato0579 @enhastolemyheart @ro-diaries @aaa-sia @okwonyo @snoopypupp @enhabooks @jjunae @criminalyun

[rose24207]

Hi I don't know if ur taking requests rn but I have an idea for a teacher au with Lando x reader where they're both teaching at the same secondary/high schl and they're together and try to keep it secret but like all the students know cuz they're so blatantly obviously in love with each other and they're like the most shipped couple by all their students. U can choose what subject lando teaches to match reader being a bio teacher but personally I get PE teacher vibes from Lando and I fee like that works rlly well. Hope u have a grt day sorry about the long request love ur work sm especially the Berlin Wall one recently it was so so good hoping to see something historical like that again if u feel like it 🫶

Miss and Mister Norris?

Summary: You teach biology. He teaches PE. You’re secretly dating. The students? Not fooled for a second.

PE!Teacher!Lando x Biology!Teacher!Reader

Genre: fluff, humorous

TW: None!

A/N: that’s such a cool idea! Thank you for the request! Also glad to see that my stories have such an impact on you guys 🥹 love ya!

Navigation

To be fair, you tried to keep it secret.

When you and Lando started dating—accidentally, clumsily, falling into it after weeks of lingering glances in the staffroom and hallway flirting that made the other teachers groan—you made a pact.

No touching at school.

No glances that lasted longer than five seconds.

Absolutely no kissing on school grounds.

And for the love of all things professional: no calling each other “babe.”

It lasted… about three days.

Because you forgot that teenagers have one major hobby: spying on adults and making up elaborate love stories.

So it started small.

One of your Year 9 students raised her hand during class and went, “Miss… is it true you and Mr. Norris had coffee together in the staffroom this morning and he gave you the last custard cream?”

You blinked. “What? That’s not a—this is a biology lesson. Focus, Amira.”

The class erupted in giggles.

It only got worse from there.

Lando, bless him, was not built for secrecy.

He was the kind of PE teacher who roller-skated through the halls to get to class on time. Who high-fived every student whether they liked it or not. Who wore sunglasses indoors and called Year 11 boys “mate” while casually ruining their pride in dodgeball.

He was sunshine in human form.

You were… you. Slightly more serious, slightly more cautious, and head of the biology department.

The only thing you two had in common?

The fact that every student knew you were head over heels for each other.

“I swear to God,” Lando whispered one Thursday morning as you passed each other in the hall, “a Year 10 just fake-fainted in front of me and asked if I’d carry her to you like a princess so you’d finally kiss me.”

You burst out laughing. “Did you?”

“I almost did.”

“Lando!”

“What?” he smirked. “We’ve already lost control of the narrative. At this point I’m just giving the people what they want.”

You rolled your eyes, but your heart fluttered.

Your students had theories.

“She’s secretly married to him.”

“They had their first kiss in the science cupboard.”

“I bet he carries her homework to the staffroom.”

“Miss is totally wearing his hoodie under her blazer, watch.”

Every time you walked past a group of students, they’d not-so-subtly hum romantic music.

One day, Lando walked into the biology wing and a group of Year 10 girls literally applauded.

“Why?” he asked, laughing.

“Because you’ve set the bar for love,” one said dramatically, clutching her heart.

You facepalmed.

The real chaos happened during Parent-Teacher Night.

You’d both been assigned different classrooms, but somehow, the news had spread. Parents were curious. Students had told them.

You and Lando, the school’s ultimate ship.

So when a parent sat across from you and asked, with a perfectly straight face, “Do you and Mr. Norris have any, uh… joint lesson plans?”—you blinked. She winked. You choked on your tea.

Lando later told you a dad asked if he was planning to propose on Sports Day.

“I mean,” Lando shrugged, “if I had a ring, that would’ve been iconic.”

You stared. “Lando.”

“What?”

“Don’t even joke about proposing at Sports Day.”

“You say that, but—”

“Lando.”

The students started a petition to get you both to chaperone prom.

It wasn’t subtle.

The heading read:

“Let the Power Couple Supervise Love”

It had 273 signatures.

Lando framed it.

“I want this at our wedding,” he grinned.

You threw a textbook at him. Gently.

Still, despite the teasing, the matchmaking, and the relentless obsession from your students, no one really saw the quiet moments.

The hand on your lower back when he walked past.

The soft murmurs exchanged behind the gym.

The way he waited outside your classroom with a smoothie when you were too stressed to eat lunch.

The way you straightened his tie when no one was watching.

And at the end of every long, exhausting, love-soaked day…

You’d curl up on the couch at home, tangled in his hoodie, grading papers while he threw Skittles into your mug and made up songs about mitochondria just to make you laugh.

One afternoon, just before the Easter holidays, you were walking past the art block when you overheard it.

Two Year 12 girls were painting a mural, gossiping about teacher crushes.

One said, “Honestly, if Mr. Norris doesn’t marry Miss Y/L/N, I’m never believing in love again.”

The other nodded. “He looks at her like she invented oxygen.”

You paused.

Smiled.

And for the first time, didn’t correct them.

One Week Later

You and Lando were walking hand-in-hand through a garden centre over the break, hot drinks in one hand, plans for summer in the other, when Lando stopped suddenly.

He turned to you.

“I know we said we’d wait,” he said.

You frowned. “Wait for what?”

He reached into his jacket.

He kneeled down.

Pulled out a ring.

Your heart stopped.

“Lando—”

“It’s not for Sports Day,” he grinned. “I promise.”

You laughed. Then cried.

And when you whispered yes, the girl from the cashier counter whispered to her colleague, “Oh my God, that’s Mr. and Miss Norris! They finally did it!”

You walked into class Monday morning.

Sat on your desk.

Smiled at your students.

“Alright,” you said. “Let’s talk genetics. Specifically… why your favorite PE teacher might become your favorite biology teacher’s husband.”

The room exploded.

Someone screamed.

Someone dropped their pen.

Someone shouted, “WE KNEW IT!”

And in the classroom next door?

Lando fist-bumped the air.

Thank you for reading!

Taglist: @ipushhimback, @ladyoflynx, @lewishamiltonismybf, @cmleitora, @hmma3 , @same1995, @amatswimming, @llando4norris, @dr3wstarkey, @hurtblossom, @ernegren, @esposamultifandom, @darleneslane

[mostlysignssomeportents]

With Great Power Came No Responsibility

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in NYC TONIGHT (26 Feb) with JOHN HODGMAN and at PENN STATE TOMORROW (Feb 27). More tour dates here. Mail-order signed copies from LA's Diesel Books.

Last night, I traveled to Toronto to deliver the annual Ursula Franklin Lecture at the University of Toronto's Innis College:

The lecture was called "With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It." It's the latest major speech in my series of talks on the subject, which started with last year's McLuhan Lecture in Berlin:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel

And continued with a summer Defcon keynote:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess

This speech specifically addresses the unique opportunities for disenshittification created by Trump's rapid unscheduled midair disassembly of the international free trade system. The US used trade deals to force nearly every country in the world to adopt the IP laws that make enshittification possible, and maybe even inevitable. As Trump burns these trade deals to the ground, the rest of the world has an unprecedented opportunity to retaliate against American bullying by getting rid of these laws and producing the tools, devices and services that can protect every tech user (including Americans) from being ripped off by US Big Tech companies.

I'm so grateful for the chance to give this talk. I was hosted for the day by the Centre for Culture and Technology, which was founded by Marshall McLuhan, and is housed in the coach house he used for his office. The talk itself took place in Innis College, named for Harold Innis, who is definitely the thinking person's Marshall McLuhan. What's more, I was mentored by Innis's daughter, Anne Innis Dagg, a radical, brilliant feminist biologist who pretty much invented the field of giraffology:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/19/pluralist-19-feb-2020/#annedagg

But with all respect due to Anne and her dad, Ursula Franklin is the thinking person's Harold Innis. A brilliant scientist, activist and communicator who dedicated her life to the idea that the most important fact about a technology wasn't what it did, but who it did it for and who it did it to. Getting to work out of McLuhan's office to present a talk in Innis's theater that was named after Franklin? Swoon!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin

Here's the text of the talk, lightly edited:

I know tonight’s talk is supposed to be about decaying tech platforms, but I want to start by talking about nurses.

A January 2025 report from Groundwork Collective documents how increasingly nurses in the USA are hired through gig apps – "Uber for nurses” – so nurses never know from one day to the next whether they're going to work, or how much they'll get paid.

There's something high-tech going on here with those nurses' wages. These nursing apps – a cartel of three companies, Shiftkey, Shiftmed and Carerev – can play all kinds of games with labor pricing.

Before Shiftkey offers a nurse a shift, it purchases that worker's credit history from a data-broker. Specifically, it pays to find out how much credit-card debt the nurse is carrying, and whether it is overdue.

The more desperate the nurse's financial straits are, the lower the wage on offer. Because the more desperate you are, the less you'll accept to come and do the gruntwork of caring for the sick, the elderly, and the dying.

Now, there are lots of things going on here, and they're all terrible. What's more, they are emblematic of “enshittification,” the word I coined to describe the decay of online platforms.

When I first started writing about this, I focused on the external symptology of enshittification, a three stage process:

First, the platform is good to its end users, while finding a way to lock them in.

Like Google, which minimized ads and maximized spending on engineering for search results, even as they bought their way to dominance, bribing every service or product with a search box to make it a Google search box.

So no matter what browser you used, what mobile OS you used, what carrier you had, you would always be searching on Google by default. This got so batshit that by the early 2020s, Google was spending enough money to buy a whole-ass Twitter, every year or two, just to make sure that no one ever tried a search engine that wasn't Google.

That's stage one: be good to end users, lock in end users.

Stage two is when the platform starts to abuse end users to tempt in and enrich business customers. For Google, that’s advertisers and web publishers. An ever-larger fraction of a Google results page is given over to ads, which are marked with ever-subtler, ever smaller, ever grayer labels. Google uses its commercial surveillance data to target ads to us.

So that's stage two: things get worse for end users and get better for business customers.

But those business customers also get locked into the platform, dependent on those customers. Once businesses are getting as little as 10% of their revenue from Google, leaving Google becomes an existential risk. We talk a lot about Google's "monopoly" power, which is derived from its dominance as a seller. But Google is also a monopsony, a powerful buyer.

So now you have Google acting as a monopolist to its users (stage one), and a monoposonist for its business customers (stage two) and here comes stage three: where Google claws back all the value in the platform, save a homeopathic residue calculated to keep end users locked in, and business customers locked to those end users.

Google becomes enshittified.

In 2019, Google had a turning point. Search had grown as much as it possibly could. More than 90% of us used Google for search, and we searched for everything. Any thought or idle question that crossed our minds, we typed into Google.

How could Google grow? There were no more users left to switch to Google. We weren't going to search for more things. What could Google do?

Well, thanks to internal memos published during last year's monopoly trial against Google, we know what they did. They made search worse. They reduced the system's accuracy it so you had to search twice or more to get to the answer, thus doubling the number of queries, and doubling the number of ads.

Meanwhile, Google entered into a secret, illegal collusive arrangement with Facebook, codenamed Jedi Blue, to rig the ad market, fixing prices so advertisers paid more and publishers got less.

And that's how we get to the enshittified Google of today, where every query serves back a blob of AI slop, over five paid results tagged with the word AD in 8-point, 10% grey on white type, which is, in turn, over ten spammy links from SEO shovelware sites filled with more AI slop.

And yet, we still keep using Google, because we're locked into it. That's enshittification, from the outside. A company that's good to end users, while locking them in. Then it makes things worse for end users, to make things better for business customers, while locking them in. Then it takes all the value for itself and turns into a giant pile of shit.

Enshittification, a tragedy in three acts.

I started off focused on the outward signs of enshittification, but I think it's time we start thinking about what's going in inside the companies to make enshittification possible.

What is the technical mechanism for enshittification? I call it twiddling. Digital businesses have infinite flexibility, bequeathed to them by the marvellously flexible digital computers they run on. That means that firms can twiddle the knobs that control the fundamental aspects of their business. Every time you interact with a firm, everything is different: prices, costs, search rankings, recommendations.

Which takes me back to our nurses. This scam, where you look up the nurse's debt load and titer down the wage you offer based on it in realtime? That's twiddling. It's something you can only do with a computer. The bosses who are doing this aren't more evil than bosses of yore, they just have better tools.

Note that these aren't even tech bosses. These are health-care bosses, who happen to have tech.

Digitalization – weaving networked computers through a firm or a sector – enables this kind of twiddling that allows firms to shift value around, from end users to business customers, from business customers back to end users, and eventually, inevitably, to themselves.

And digitalization is coming to every sector – like nursing. Which means enshittification is coming to every sector – like nursing.

The legal scholar Veena Dubal coined a term to describe the twiddling that suppresses the wages of debt-burdened nurses. It's called "Algorithmic Wage Discrimination," and it follows the gig economy.

The gig economy is a major locus of enshittification, and it’s the largest tear in the membrane separating the virtual world from the real world. Gig work, where your shitty boss is a shitty app, and you aren't even allowed to call yourself an employee.

Uber invented this trick. Drivers who are picky about the jobs the app puts in front of them start to get higher wage offers. But if they yield to temptation and take some of those higher-waged option, then the wage starts to go down again, in random intervals, by small increments, designed to be below the threshold for human perception. Not so much boiling the frog as poaching it, until the Uber driver has gone into debt to buy a new car, and given up the side hustles that let them be picky about the rides they accepted. Then their wage goes down, and down, and down.

Twiddling is a crude trick done quickly. Any task that's simple but time consuming is a prime candidate for automation, and this kind of wage-theft would be unbearably tedious, labor-intensive and expensive to perform manually. No 19th century warehouse full of guys with green eyeshades slaving over ledgers could do this. You need digitalization.

Twiddling nurses' hourly wages is a perfect example of the role digitization pays in enshittification. Because this kind of thing isn't just bad for nurses – it's bad for patients, too. Do we really think that paying nurses based on how desperate they are, at a rate calculated to increase that desperation, and thus decrease the wage they are likely to work for, is going to result in nurses delivering the best care?

Do you want to your catheter inserted by a nurse on food stamps, who drove an Uber until midnight the night before, and skipped breakfast this morning in order to make rent?

This is why it’s so foolish to say "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product." “If you’re not paying for the product” ascribes a mystical power to advertising-driven services: the power to bypass our critical faculties by surveilling us, and data-mining the resulting dossiers to locate our mental bind-spots, and weaponize them to get us to buy anything an advertiser is selling.

In this formulation, we are complicit in our own exploitation. By choosing to use "free" services, we invite our own exploitation by surveillance capitalists who have perfected a mind-control ray powered by the surveillance data we're voluntarily handing over by choosing ad-driven services.

The moral is that if we only went back to paying for things, instead of unrealistically demanding that everything be free, we would restore capitalism to its functional, non-surveillant state, and companies would start treating us better, because we'd be the customers, not the products.

That's why the surveillance capitalism hypothesis elevates companies like Apple as virtuous alternatives. Because Apple charges us money, rather than attention, it can focus on giving us better service, rather than exploiting us.

There's a superficially plausible logic to this. After all, in 2022, Apple updated its iOS operating system, which runs on iPhones and other mobile devices, introducing a tick box that allowed you to opt out of third-party surveillance, most notably Facebook’s.

96% of Apple customers ticked that box. The other 4% were, presumably drunk, or Facebook employees, or Facebook employees who were drunk. Which makes sense, because if I worked for Facebook, I'd be drunk all the time.

So on the face of it, it seems like Apple isn't treating its customers like "the product." But simultaneously with this privacy measure, Apple was secretly turning on its own surveillance system for iPhone owners, which would spy on them in exactly the way Facebook had, for exactly the same purpose: to target ads to you based on the places you'd been, the things you'd searched for, the communications you'd had, the links you'd clicked.

Apple didn't ask its customers for permission to spy on them. It didn't let opt out of this spying. It didn’t even tell them about it, and when it was caught, Apple lied about it.

It goes without saying that the $1000 Apple distraction rectangle in your pocket is something you paid for. The fact that you've paid for it doesn't stop Apple from treating you as the product. Apple treats its business customers – app vendors – like the product, screwing them out of 30 cents on every dollar they bring in, with mandatory payment processing fees that are 1,000% higher than the already extortionate industry norm.

Apple treats its end users – people who shell out a grand for a phone – like the product, spying on them to help target ads to them.

Apple treats everyone like the product.

This is what's going on with our gig-app nurses: the nurses are the product. The patients are the product. The hospitals are the product. In enshittification, "the product" is anyone who can be productized.

Fair and dignified treatment is not something you get as a customer loyalty perk, in exchange for parting with your money, rather than your attention. How do you get fair and dignified treatment? Well, I'm gonna get to that, but let's stay with our nurses for a while first.

The nurses are the product, and they're being twiddled, because they've been conscripted into the tech industry, via the digitalization of their own industry.

It's tempting to blame digitalization for this. But tech companies were not born enshittified. They spent years – decades – making pleasing products. If you're old enough to remember the launch of Google, you'll recall that, at the outset, Google was magic.

You could Ask Jeeves questions for a million years, you could load up Altavista with ten trillion boolean search operators meant to screen out low-grade results, and never come up with answers as crisp, as useful, as helpful, as the ones you'd get from a few vaguely descriptive words in a Google search-bar.

There's a reason we all switched to Google. Why so many of us bought iPhones. Why we joined our friends on Facebook. All of these services were born digital. They could have enshittified at any time. But they didn't – until they did. And they did it all at once.

If you were a nurse, and every patient that staggered into the ER had the same dreadful symptoms, you'd call the public health department and report a suspected outbreak of a new and dangerous epidemic.

Ursula Franklin held that technology's outcomes were not preordained. They are the result of deliberate choices. I like that very much, it's a very science fictional way of thinking about technology. Good science fiction isn't merely about what the technology does, but who it does it for, and who it does it to.

Those social factors are far more important than the mere technical specifications of a gadget. They're the difference between a system that warns you when you're about to drift out of your lane, and a system that tells your insurer that you nearly drifted out of your lane, so they can add $10 to your monthly premium.

They’re the difference between a spell checker that lets you know you've made a typo, and bossware that lets your manager use the number of typos you made this quarter so he can deny your bonus.

They’re the difference between an app that remembers where you parked your car, and an app that uses the location of your car as a criteria for including you in a reverse warrant for the identities of everyone in the vicinity of an anti-government protest.

I believe that enshittification is caused by changes not to technology, but to the policy environment. These are changes to the rules of the game, undertaken in living memory, by named parties, who were warned at the time about the likely outcomes of their actions, who are today very rich and respected, and face no consequences or accountability for their role in ushering in the enshittocene. They venture out into polite society without ever once wondering if someone is sizing them up for a pitchfork.

In other words: I think we created a crimogenic environment, a perfect breeding pool for the most pathogenic practices in our society, that have therefore multiplied, dominating decision-making in our firms and states, leading to a vast enshittening of everything.

And I think there's good news there, because if enshittification isn't the result a new kind of evil person, or the great forces of history bearing down on the moment to turn everything to shit, but rather the result of specific policy choices, then we can reverse those policies, make better ones and emerge from the enshittocene, consigning the enshitternet to the scrapheap of history, a mere transitional state between the old, good internet, and a new, good internet.

I'm not going to talk about AI today, because oh my god is AI a boring, overhyped subject. But I will use a metaphor about AI, about the limited liability company, which is a kind of immortal, artificial colony organism in which human beings serve as a kind of gut flora. My colleague Charlie Stross calls corporations "slow AI.”

So you've got these slow AIs whose guts are teeming with people, and the AI's imperative, the paperclip it wants to maximize, is profit. To maximize profits, you charge as much as you can, you pay your workers and suppliers as little as you can, you spend as little as possible on safety and quality.

Every dollar you don't spend on suppliers, workers, quality or safety is a dollar that can go to executives and shareholders. So there's a simple model of the corporation that could maximize its profits by charging infinity dollars, while paying nothing to its workers or suppliers, and ignoring quality and safety.

But that corporation wouldn't make any money, for the obvious reasons that none of us would buy what it was selling, and no one would work for it or supply it with goods. These constraints act as disciplining forces that tamp down the AI's impulse to charge infinity and pay nothing.

In tech, we have four of these constraints, anti-enshittificatory sources of discipline that make products and services better, pay workers more, and keep executives’ and shareholders' wealth from growing at the expense of customers, suppliers and labor.

The first of these constraints is markets. All other things being equal, a business that charges more and delivers less will lose customers to firms that are more generous about sharing value with workers, customers and suppliers.

This is the bedrock of capitalist theory, and it's the ideological basis for competition law, what our American cousins call "antitrust law."

The first antitrust law was 1890's Sherman Act, whose sponsor, Senator John Sherman, stumped for it from the senate floor, saying:

If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity. 

Senator Sherman was reflecting the outrage of the anitmonopolist movement of the day, when proprietors of monopolistic firms assumed the role of dictators, with the power to decide who would work, who would starve, what could be sold, and what it cost.

Lacking competitors, they were too big to fail, too big to jail, and too big to care. As Lily Tomlin used to put it in her spoof AT&T ads on SNL: "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.”

So what happened to the disciplining force of competition? We killed it. Starting 40-some years ago, the Reagaonomic views of the Chicago School economists transformed antitrust. They threw out John Sherman's idea that we need to keep companies competitive to prevent the emergence of "autocrats of trade,"and installed the idea that monopolies are efficient.

In other words, if Google has a 90% search market share, which it does, then we must infer that Google is the best search engine ever, and the best search engine possible. The only reason a better search engine hasn't stepped in is that Google is so skilled, so efficient, that there is no conceivable way to improve upon it.

We can tell that Google is the best because it has a monopoly, and we can tell that the monopoly is good because Google is the best.

So 40 years ago, the US – and its major trading partners – adopted an explicitly pro-monopoly competition policy.

Now, you'll be glad to hear that this isn't what happened to Canada. The US Trade Rep didn't come here and force us to neuter our competition laws. But don't get smug! The reason that didn't happen is that it didn't have to. Because Canada had no competition law to speak of, and never has.

In its entire history, the Competition Bureau has challenged three mergers, and it has halted precisely zero mergers, which is how we've ended up with a country that is beholden to the most mediocre plutocrats imaginable like the Irvings, the Westons, the Stronachs, the McCains and the Rogerses.

The only reason these chinless wonders were able to conquer this country Is that the Americans had been crushing their monopolists before they could conquer the US and move on to us. But 40 years ago, the rest of the world adopted the Chicago School's pro-monopoly "consumer welfare standard,” and we got…monopolies.

Monopolies in pharma, beer, glass bottles, vitamin C, athletic shoes, microchips, cars, mattresses, eyeglasses, and, of course, professional wrestling.

Remember: these are specific policies adopted in living memory, by named individuals, who were warned, and got rich, and never faced consequences. The economists who conceived of these policies are still around today, polishing their fake Nobel prizes, teaching at elite schools, making millions consulting for blue-chip firms.

When we confront them with the wreckage their policies created, they protest their innocence, maintaining – with a straight face – that there's no way to affirmatively connect pro-monopoly policies with the rise of monopolies.

It's like we used to put down rat poison and we didn't have a rat problem. Then these guys made us stop, and now rats are chewing our faces off, and they're making wide innocent eyes, saying, "How can you be sure that our anti-rat-poison policies are connected to global rat conquest? Maybe this is simply the Time of the Rat! Maybe sunspots caused rats to become more fecund than at any time in history! And if they bought the rat poison factories and shut them all down, well, so what of it? Shutting down rat poison factories after you've decided to stop putting down rat poison is an economically rational, Pareto-optimal decision."

Markets don't discipline tech companies because they don't compete with rivals, they buy them. That's a quote, from Mark Zuckerberg: “It is better to buy than to compete.”

Which is why Mark Zuckerberg bought Instagram for a billion dollars, even though it only had 12 employees and 25m users. As he wrote in a spectacularly ill-advised middle-of-the-night email to his CFO, he had to buy Instagram, because Facebook users were leaving Facebook for Instagram. By buying Instagram, Zuck ensured that anyone who left Facebook – the platform – would still be a prisoner of Facebook – the company.

Despite the fact that Zuckerberg put this confession in writing, the Obama administration let him go ahead with the merger, because every government, of every political stripe, for 40 years, adopted the posture that monopolies were efficient.

Now, think about our twiddled, immiserated nurses. Hospitals are among the most consolidated sectors in the US. First, we deregulated pharma mergers, and the pharma companies gobbled each other up at the rate of naughts, and they jacked up the price of drugs. So hospitals also merged to monopoly, a defensive maneuver that let a single hospital chain corner the majority of a region or city and say to the pharma companies, "either you make your products cheaper, or you can't sell them to any of our hospitals."

Of course, once this mission was accomplished, the hospitals started screwing the insurers, who staged their own incestuous orgy, buying and merging until most Americans have just three or two insurance options. This let the insurers fight back against the hospitals, but left patients and health care workers defenseless against the consolidated power of hospitals, pharma companies, pharmacy benefit managers, group purchasing organizations, and other health industry cartels, duopolies and monopolies.

Which is why nurses end up signing on to work for hospitals that use these ghastly apps. Remember, there's just three of these apps, replacing dozens of staffing agencies that once competed for nurses' labor.

Meanwhile, on the patient side, competition has never exercised discipline. No one ever shopped around for a cheaper ambulance or a better ER while they were having a heart attack. The price that people are willing to pay to not die is “everything they have.”

So you have this sector that has no business being a commercial enterprise in the first place, losing what little discipline they faced from competition, paving the way for enshittification.

But I said there are four forces that discipline companies. The second one of these forces is regulation, discipline imposed by states.

It’s a mistake to see market discipline and state discipline as two isolated realms. They are intimately connected. Because competition is a necessary condition for effective regulation.

Let me put this in terms that even the most ideological libertarians can understand. Say you think there should be precisely one regulation that governments should enforce: honoring contracts. For the government to serve as referee in that game, it must have the power to compel the players to honor their contracts. Which means that the smallest government you can have is determined by the largest corporation you're willing to permit.

So even if you're the kind of Musk-addled libertarian who can no longer open your copy of Atlas Shrugged because the pages are all stuck together, who pines for markets for human kidneys, and demands the right to sell yourself into slavery, you should still want a robust antitrust regime, so that these contracts can be enforced.

When a sector cartelizes, when it collapses into oligarchy, when the internet turns into "five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four," then it captures its regulators.

After all, a sector with 100 competing companies is a rabble, at each others' throats. They can't agree on anything, especially how they're going to lobby.

While a sector of five companies – or four – or three – or two – or one – is a cartel, a racket, a conspiracy in waiting. A sector that has been boiled down to a mere handful of firms can agree on a common lobbying position.

What's more, they are so insulated from "wasteful competition" that they are aslosh in cash that they can mobilize to make their regulatory preferences into regulations. In other words, they can capture their regulators.

“Regulatory capture" may sound abstract and complicated, so let me put it in concrete terms. In the UK, the antitrust regulator is called the Competition and Markets Authority, run – until recently – by Marcus Bokkerink. The CMA has been one of the world's most effective investigators and regulators of Big Tech fuckery.

Last month, UK PM Keir Starmer fired Bokkerink and replaced him with Doug Gurr, the former head of Amazon UK. Hey, Starmer, the henhouse is on the line, they want their fox back.

But back to our nurses: there are plenty of examples of regulatory capture lurking in that example, but I'm going to pick the most egregious one, the fact that there are data brokers who will sell you information about the credit card debts of random Americans.

This is because the US Congress hasn't passed a new consumer privacy law since 1988, when Ronald Reagan signed a law called the Video Privacy Protection Act that bans video store clerks from telling newspapers which VHS cassettes you took home. The fact that Congress hasn't updated Americans' privacy protections since Die Hard was in theaters isn't a coincidence or an oversight. It is the expensively purchased inaction of a heavily concentrated – and thus wildly profitable – privacy-invasion industry that has monetized the abuse of human rights at unimaginable scale.

The coalition in favor of keeping privacy law frozen since the season finale of St Elsewhere keeps growing, because there is an unbounded set of way to transform the systematic invasion of our human rights into cash. There's a direct line from this phenomenon to nurses whose paychecks go down when they can't pay their credit-card bills.

So competition is dead, regulation is dead, and companies aren't disciplined by markets or by states.

But there are four forces that discipline firms, contributing to an inhospitable environment for the reproduction of sociopathic. enshittifying monsters.

So let's talk about those other two forces. The first is interoperability, the principle of two or more things working together. Like, you can put anyone's shoelaces in your shoes, anyone's gas in your gas tank, and anyone's lightbulbs in your light-socket. In the non-digital world, interop takes a lot of work, you have to agree on the direction, pitch, diameter, voltage, amperage and wattage for that light socket, or someone's gonna get their hand blown off.

But in the digital world, interop is built in, because there's only one kind of computer we know how to make, the Turing-complete, universal, von Neumann machine, a computing machine capable of executing every valid program.

Which means that for any enshittifying program, there's a counterenshittificatory program waiting to be run. When HP writes a program to ensure that its printers reject third-party ink, someone else can write a program to disable that checking.

For gig workers, antienshittificatory apps can do yeoman duty. For example, Indonesian gig drivers formed co-ops, that commission hackers to write modifications for their dispatch apps. For example, the taxi app won't book a driver to pick someone up at a train station, unless they're right outside, but when the big trains pull in that's a nightmare scene of total, lethal chaos.

So drivers have an app that lets them spoof their GPS, which lets them park up around the corner, but have the app tell their bosses that they're right out front of the station. When a fare arrives, they can zip around and pick them up, without contributing to the stationside mishegas.

In the USA, a company called Para shipped an app to help Doordash drivers get paid more. You see, Doordash drivers make most of their money on tips, and the Doordash driver app hides the tip amount until you accept a job, meaning you don't know whether you're accepting a job that pays $1.50 or $11.50 with tip, until you agree to take it. So Para made an app that extracted the tip amount and showed it to drivers before they clocked on.

But Doordash shut it down, because in America, apps like Para are illegal. In 1998, Bill Clinton signed a law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and section 1201 of the DMCA makes is a felony to "bypass an access control for a copyrighted work," with penalties of $500k and a 5-year prison sentence for a first offense. So just the act of reverse-engineering an app like the Doordash app is a potential felony, which is why companies are so desperately horny to get you to use their apps rather than their websites.

The web is open, apps are closed. The majority of web users have installed an ad blocker (which is also a privacy blocker). But no one installs an ad blocker for an app, because it's a felony to distribute that tool, because you have to reverse-engineer the app to make it. An app is just a website wrapped in enough IP so that the company that made it can send you to prison if you dare to modify it so that it serves your interests rather than theirs.

Around the world, we have enacted a thicket of laws, we call “IP laws,” that make it illegal to modify services, products, and devices, so that they serve your interests, rather than the interests of the shareholders.

Like I said, these laws were enacted in living memory, by people who are among us, who were warned about the obvious, eminently foreseeable consequences of their reckless plans, who did it anyway.

Back in 2010, two ministers from Stephen Harper's government decided to copy-paste America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act into Canadian law. They consulted on the proposal to make it illegal to reverse engineer and modify services, products and devices, and they got an earful! 6,138 Canadians sent in negative comments on the consultation. They warned that making it illegal to bypass digital locks would interfere with repair of devices as diverse as tractors, cars, and medical equipment, from ventilators to insulin pumps.

These Canadians warned that laws banning tampering with digital locks would let American tech giants corner digital markets, forcing us to buy our apps and games from American app stores, that could cream off any commission they chose to levy. They warned that these laws were a gift to monopolists who wanted to jack up the price of ink; that these copyright laws, far from serving Canadian artists would lock us to American platforms. Because every time someone in our audience bought a book, a song, a game, a video, that was locked to an American app, it could never be unlocked.

So if we, the creative workers of Canada, tried to migrate to a Canadian store, our audience couldn't come with us. They couldn't move their purchases from the US app to a Canadian one.

6,138 Canadians told them this, while just 54 respondents sided with Heritage Minister James Moore and Industry Minister Tony Clement. Then, James Moore gave a speech, at the International Chamber of Commerce meeting here in Toronto, where he said he would only be listening to the 54 cranks who supported his terrible ideas, on the grounds that the 6,138 people who disagreed with him were "babyish…radical extremists."

So in 2012, we copied America's terrible digital locks law into the Canadian statute book, and now we live in James Moore and Tony Clement's world, where it is illegal to tamper with a digital lock. So if a company puts a digital lock on its product they can do anything behind that lock, and it's a crime to undo it.

For example, if HP puts a digital lock on its printers that verifies that you're not using third party ink cartridges, or refilling an HP cartridge, it's a crime to bypass that lock and use third party ink. Which is how HP has gotten away with ratcheting the price of ink up, and up, and up.

Printer ink is now the most expensive fluid that a civilian can purchase without a special permit. It's colored water that costs $10k/gallon, which means that you print out your grocery lists with liquid that costs more than the semen of a Kentucky Derby-winning stallion.

That's the world we got from Clement and Moore, in living memory, after they were warned, and did it anyway. The world where farmers can't fix their tractors, where independent mechanics can't fix your car, where hospitals during the pandemic lockdowns couldn't service their failing ventilators, where every time a Canadian iPhone user buys an app from a Canadian software author, every dollar they spend takes a round trip through Apple HQ in Cupertino, California and comes back 30 cents lighter.

Let me remind you this is the world where a nurse can't get a counter-app, a plug-in, for the “Uber for nurses” app they have to use to get work, that lets them coordinate with other nurses to refuse shifts until the wages on offer rise to a common level or to block surveillance of their movements and activity.

Interoperability was a major disciplining force on tech firms. After all, if you make the ads on your website sufficiently obnoxious, some fraction of your users will install an ad-blocker, and you will never earn another penny from them. Because no one in the history of ad-blockers has ever uninstalled an ad-blocker. But once it's illegal to make an ad-blocker, there's no reason not to make the ads as disgusting, invasive, obnoxious as you can, to shift all the value from the end user to shareholders and executives.

So we get monopolies and monopolies capture their regulators, and they can ignore the laws they don't like, and prevent laws that might interfere with their predatory conduct – like privacy laws – from being passed. They get new laws passed, laws that let them wield governmental power to prevent other companies from entering the market.

So three of the four forces are neutralized: competition, regulation, and interoperability. That left just one disciplining force holding enshittification at bay: labor.

Tech workers are a strange sort of workforce, because they have historically been very powerful, able to command high wages and respect, but they did it without joining unions. Union density in tech is abysmal, almost undetectable. Tech workers' power didn't come from solidarity, it came from scarcity. There weren't enough workers to fill the jobs going begging, and tech workers are unfathomnably productive. Even with the sky-high salaries tech workers commanded, every hour of labor they put in generated far more value for their employers.

Faced with a tight labor market, and the ability to turn every hour of tech worker overtime into gold, tech bosses pulled out all the stops to motivate that workforce. They appealed to workers' sense of mission, convinced them they were holy warriors, ushering in a new digital age. Google promised them they would "organize the world's information and make it useful.” Facebook promised them they would “make the world more open and connected."

There's a name for this tactic: the librarian Fobazi Ettarh calls it "vocational awe." That’s where an appeal to a sense of mission and pride is used to motivate workers to work for longer hours and worse pay.

There are all kinds of professions that run on vocational awe: teaching, daycares and eldercare, and, of course, nursing.

Techies are different from those other workers though, because they've historically been incredibly scarce, which meant that while bosses could motivate them to work on projects they believed in, for endless hours, the minute bosses ordered them to enshittify the projects they'd missed their mothers' funerals to ship on deadline these workers would tell their bosses to fuck off.

If their bosses persisted in these demands, the techies would walk off the job, cross the street, and get a better job the same day.

So for many years, tech workers were the fourth and final constraint, holding the line after the constraints of competition, regulation and interop slipped away. But then came the mass tech layoffs. 260,000 in 2023; 150,000 in 2024; tens of thousands this year, with Facebook planning a 5% headcount massacre while doubling its executive bonuses.

Tech workers can't tell their bosses to go fuck themselves anymore, because there's ten other workers waiting to take their jobs.

Now, I promised I wouldn't talk about AI, but I have to break that promise a little, just to point out that the reason tech bosses are so horny for AI Is because they think it'll let them fire tech workers and replace them with pliant chatbots who'll never tell them to fuck off.

So that's where enshittification comes from: multiple changes to the environment. The fourfold collapse of competition, regulation, interoperability and worker power creates an enshittogenic environment, where the greediest, most sociopathic elements in the body corporate thrive at the expense of those elements that act as moderators of their enshittificatory impulses.

We can try to cure these corporations. We can use antitrust law to break them up, fine them, force strictures upon them. But until we fix the environment, other the contagion will spread to other firms.

So let's talk about how we create a hostile environment for enshittifiers, so the population and importance of enshittifying agents in companies dwindles to 1990s levels. We won't get rid of these elements. So long as the profit motive is intact, there will be people whose pursuit of profit is pathological, unmoderated by shame or decency. But we can change the environment so that these don't dominate our lives.

Let's talk about antitrust. After 40 years of antitrust decline, this decade has seen a massive, global resurgence of antitrust vigor, one that comes in both left- and right-wing flavors.

Over the past four years, the Biden administration’s trustbusters at the Federal Trade Commission, Department of Justice and Consumer Finance Protection Bureau did more antitrust enforcement than all their predecessors for the past 40 years combined.

There's certainly factions of the Trump administration that are hostile to this agenda but Trump's antitrust enforcers at the DoJ and FTC now say that they'll preserve and enforce Biden's new merger guidelines, which stop companies from buying each other up, and they've already filed suit to block a giant tech merger.

Of course, last summer a judge found Google guilty of monopolization, and now they're facing a breakup, which explains why they've been so generous and friendly to the Trump administration.

Meanwhile, in Canada, our toothless Competition Bureau's got fitted for a set of titanium dentures last June, when Bill C59 passed Parliament, granting sweeping new powers to our antitrust regulator.

It's true that UK PM Keir Starmer just fired the head of the UK Competition and Markets Authority and replaced him with the ex-boss of Amazon UK boss.But the thing that makes that so tragic is that the UK CMA had been doing astonishingly great work under various conservative governments.

In the EU, they've passed the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, and they're going after Big Tech with both barrels. Other countries around the world – Australia, Germany, France, Japan, South Korea and China (yes, China!) – have passed new antitrust laws, and launched major antitrust enforcement actions, often collaborating with each other.

So you have the UK Competition and Markets Authority using its investigatory powers to research and publish a deep market study on Apple's abusive 30% app tax, and then the EU uses that report as a roadmap for fining Apple, and then banning Apple's payments monopoly under new regulations.Then South Korea and Japan trustbusters translate the EU's case and win nearly identical cases in their courts

What about regulatory capture? Well, we're starting to see regulators get smarter about reining in Big Tech. For example, the EU's Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act were designed to bypass the national courts of EU member states, especially Ireland, the tax-haven where US tech companies pretend to have their EU headquarters.

The thing about tax havens is that they always turn into crime havens, because if Apple can pretend to be Irish this week, it can pretend to be Maltese or Cypriot or Luxembourgeois next week. So Ireland has to let US Big Tech companies ignore EU privacy laws and other regulations, or it'll lose them to sleazier, more biddable competitor nations.

So from now on, EU tech regulation is getting enforced in the EU's federal courts, not in national courts, treating the captured Irish courts as damage and routing around them.

Canada needs to strengthen its own tech regulation enforcement, unwinding monopolistic mergers from the likes of Bell and Rogers, but most of all, Canada needs to pursue an interoperability agenda.

Last year, Canada passed two very exciting bills: Bill C244, a national Right to Repair law; and Bill C294, an interoperability law. Nominally, both of these laws allow Canadians to fix everything from tractors to insulin pumps, and to modify the software in their devices from games consoles to printers, so they will work with third party app stores, consumables and add-ons.

However, these bills are essentially useless, because these bills don’t permit Canadians to acquire tools to break digital locks. So you can modify your printer to accept third party ink, or interpret a car's diagnostic codes so any mechanic can fix it, but only if there isn't a digital lock stopping you from doing so, because giving someone a tool to break a digital lock remains illegal thanks to the law that James Moore and Tony Clement shoved down the nation's throat in 2012.

And every single printer, smart speaker, car, tractor, appliance, medical implant and hospital medical device has a digital lock that stops you from fixing it, modifying it, or using third party parts, software, or consumables in it.

Which means that these two landmark laws on repair and interop are useless. So why not get rid of the 2012 law that bans breaking digital locks? Because these laws are part of our trade agreement with the USA. This is a law needed to maintain tariff-free access to US markets.

I don’t know if you've heard, but Donald Trump is going to impose a 25%, across-the-board tariff against Canadian exports. Trudeau's response is to impose retaliatory tariffs, which will make every American product that Canadians buy 25% more expensive. This is a very weird way to punish America!

You know what would be better? Abolish the Canadian laws that protect US Big Tech companies from Canadian competition. Make it legal to reverse-engineer, jailbreak and modify American technology products and services. Don't ask Facebook to pay a link tax to Canadian newspapers, make it legal to jailbreak all of Meta's apps and block all the ads in them, so Mark Zuckerberg doesn't make a dime off of us.

Make it legal for Canadian mechanics to jailbreak your Tesla and unlock every subscription feature, like autopilot and full access to your battery, for one price, forever. So you get more out of your car, and when you sell it, then next owner continues to enjoy those features, meaning they'll pay more for your used car.

That's how you hurt Elon Musk: not by being performatively appalled at his Nazi salutes. That doesn't cost him a dime. He loves the attention. No! Strike at the rent-extracting, insanely high-margin aftermarket subscriptions he relies on for his Swastikar business. Kick that guy right in the dongle!

Let Canadians stand up a Canadian app store for Apple devices, one that charges 3% to process transactions, not 30%. Then, every Canadian news outlet that sells subscriptions through an app, and every Canadian software author, musician and writer who sells through a mobile platform gets a 25% increase in revenues overnight, without signing up a single new customer.

But we can sign up new customers, by selling jailbreaking software and access to Canadian app stores, for every mobile device and games console to everyone in the world, and by pitching every games publisher and app maker on selling in the Canadian app store to customers anywhere without paying a 30% vig to American big tech companies.

We could sell every mechanic in the world a $100/month subscription to a universal diagnostic tool. Every farmer in the world could buy a kit that would let them fix their own John Deere tractors without paying a $200 callout charge for a Deere technician who inspects the repair the farmer is expected to perform.

They'd beat a path to our door. Canada could become a tech export powerhouse, while making everything cheaper for Canadian tech users, while making everything more profitable for anyone who sells media or software in an online store. And – this is the best part – it’s a frontal assault on the largest, most profitable US companies, the companies that are single-handedly keeping the S&P 500 in the black, striking directly at their most profitable lines of business, taking the revenues from those ripoff scams from hundreds of billions to zero, overnight, globally.

We don't have to stop at exporting reasonably priced pharmaceuticals to Americans! We could export the extremely lucrative tools of technological liberation to our American friends, too.

That's how you win a trade-war.

What about workers? Here we have good news and bad news.

The good news is that public approval for unions is at a high mark last seen in the early 1970s, and more workers want to join a union than at any time in generations, and unions themselves are sitting on record-breaking cash reserves they could be using to organize those workers.

But here's the bad news. The unions spent the Biden years, when they had the most favorable regulatory environment since the Carter administration, when public support for unions was at an all-time high, when more workers than ever wanted to join a union, when they had more money than ever to spend on unionizing those workers, doing fuck all. They allocatid mere pittances to union organizing efforts with the result that we finished the Biden years with fewer unionized workers than we started them with.

Then we got Trump, who illegally fired National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox, leaving the NLRB without a quorum and thus unable to act on unfair labor practices or to certify union elections.

This is terrible. But it’s not game over. Trump fired the referees, and he thinks that this means the game has ended. But here's the thing: firing the referee doesn't end the game, it just means we're throwing out the rules. Trump thinks that labor law creates unions, but he's wrong. Unions are why we have labor law. Long before unions were legal, we had unions, who fought goons and ginks and company finks in` pitched battles in the streets.

That illegal solidarity resulted in the passage of labor law, which legalized unions. Labor law is passed because workers build power through solidarity. Law doesn't create that solidarity, it merely gives it a formal basis in law. Strip away that formal basis, and the worker power remains.

Worker power is the answer to vocational awe. After all, it's good for you and your fellow workers to feel a sense of mission about your jobs. If you feel that sense of mission, if you feel the duty to protect your users, your patients, your patrons, your students, a union lets you fulfill that duty.

We saw that in 2023 when Doug Ford promised to destroy the power of Ontario's public workers. Workers across the province rose up, promising a general strike, and Doug Ford folded like one of his cheap suits. Workers kicked the shit out of him, and we'll do it again. Promises made, promises kept.

The unscheduled midair disassembly of American labor law means that workers can have each others' backs again. Tech workers need other workers' help, because tech workers aren't scarce anymore, not after a half-million layoffs. Which means tech bosses aren't afraid of them anymore.

We know how tech bosses treat workers they aren't afraid of. Look at Jeff Bezos: the workers in his warehouses are injured on the job at 3 times the national rate, his delivery drivers have to pee in bottles, and they are monitored by AI cameras that snitch on them if their eyeballs aren't in the proscribed orientation or if their mouth is open too often while they drive, because policy forbids singing along to the radio.

By contrast, Amazon coders get to show up for work with pink mohawks, facial piercings, and black t-shirts that say things their bosses don't understand. They get to pee whenever they want. Jeff Bezos isn't sentimental about tech workers, nor does he harbor a particularized hatred of warehouse workers and delivery drivers. He treats his workers as terribly as he can get away with. That means that the pee bottles are coming for the coders, too.

It's not just Amazon, of course. Take Apple. Tim Cook was elevated to CEO in 2011. Apple's board chose him to succeed founder Steve Jobs because he is the guy who figured out how to shift Apple's production to contract manufacturers in China, without skimping on quality assurance, or suffering leaks of product specifications ahead of the company's legendary showy launches.

Today, Apple's products are made in a gigantic Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou nicknamed "iPhone City.” Indeed, these devices arrive in shipping containers at the Port of Los Angeles in a state of pristine perfection, manufactured to the finest tolerances, and free of any PR leaks.

To achieve this miraculous supply chain, all Tim Cook had to do was to make iPhone City a living hell, a place that is so horrific to work that they had to install suicide nets around the worker dorms to catch the plummeting bodies of workers who were so brutalized by Tim Cook's sweatshop that they attempted to take their own lives.

Tim Cook is also not sentimentally attached to tech workers, nor is he hostile to Chinese assembly line workers. He just treats his workers as badly as he can get away with, and with mass layoffs in the tech sector he can treat his coders much, much worse

How do tech workers get unions? Well, there are tech-specific organizations like Tech Solidarity and the Tech Workers Coalition. But tech workers will only get unions by having solidarity with other workers and receiving solidarity back from them. We all need to support every union. All workers need to have each other's backs.

We are entering a period of omnishambolic polycrisis.The ominous rumble of climate change, authoritarianism, genocide, xenophobia and transphobia has turned into an avalanche. The perpetrators of these crimes against humanity have weaponized the internet, colonizing the 21st century's digital nervous system, using it to attack its host, threatening civilization itself.

The enshitternet was purpose-built for this kind of apocalyptic co-option, organized around giant corporations who will trade a habitable planet and human rights for a three percent tax cut, who default us all into twiddle-friendly algorithmic feed, and block the interoperability that would let us escape their clutches with the backing of powerful governments whom they can call upon to "protect their IP rights."

It didn't have to be this way. The enshitternet was not inevitable. It was the product of specific policy choices, made in living memory, by named individuals.

No one came down off a mountain with two stone tablets, intoning Tony Clement, James Moore: Thou shalt make it a crime for Canadians to jailbreak their phones. Those guys chose enshittification, throwing away thousands of comments from Canadians who warned them what would come of it.

We don't have to be eternal prisoners of the catastrophic policy blunders of mediocre Tory ministers. As the omnicrisis polyshambles unfolds around us, we have the means, motive and opportunity to craft Canadian policies that bolster our sovereignty, protect our rights, and help us to set every technology user, in every country (including the USA) free.

The Trump presidency is an existential crisis but it also presents opportunities. When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla. We once had an old, good internet, whose major defect was that it required too much technical expertise to use, so all our normie friends were excluded from that wondrous playground.

Web 2.0's online services had greased slides that made it easy for anyone to get online, but escaping from those Web 2.0 walled gardens meant was like climbing out of a greased pit. A new, good internet is possible, and necessary. We can build it, with all the technological self-determination of the old, good internet, and the ease of use of Web 2.0.

A place where we can find each other, coordinate and mobilize to resist and survive climate collapse, fascism, genocide and authoritarianism. We can build that new, good internet, and we must.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/#enshittification-eh

[wh0reforcoriolanussnow]

Could u do a Tom Blyth x reader where they’re roaming the streets of Berlin late at night after a day full of filming and the public don’t really know if Tom is in a relationship and then a few fans see you and Tom together. They post it on social media and it blows up and you read the comments and find very negative comments about you . The next time you and Tom go for a walk, you are very on edge and Tom notices this and asks you what’s wrong and he finds out you’ve been reading hate comments and he posts smth on his social media abt it or smth

Thank you :) I love ur work so much 💗

Noticed in Public || Tom Blyth x gf!reader

A/n: I love this! Thank you anon :) Also included my own little twist of reader being his hair and makeup artist.

Warnings: none!

Wc:

Divider by @pommecita

"I've been waiting for this all day," Tom lets out a sigh of relief as he wraps his arm around your shoulder, your arm wrapping itself around his torso. The two of you were on your nightly stroll around the city of berlin.

During the day, Tom would be filming on set and you would be doing his hair and makeup. You enjoy the time you would spend with each other during the hustle of filming days, but you most enjoyed the alone time you would have, exploring around the city that you would be in for a couple more months.

Berlin never slept. There was always something to do around even in the late hours of night. And you and Tom never got bored; whether it be exploring different parks, trying out different restaurants, or just walking around with each other; talking about everything and anything, enjoying each other's company.

You and Tom walk along on the many bridges in Berlin, people littering it. The good thing about hanging out in the middle of the night was that fans spotting the both of you was very rare. Tom's fans didn't weren't even fully sure that he was dating someone; let alone his own hair and makeup artist. Your relationship with him was very private, only with a few pics of you together but no one though much of it.

With an arm still around his torso, and his around you shoulder, pulling you closer to him, the two of you walk past a group of girls who probably were in their late teens. You couldn't help but notice their whispering as they looked at the two of you, Tom oblivious to this.

Feeling your arm slightly loosen around his torso and your attention somewhere else, he tilts your chin up, placing a kiss on your lips. "You okay?" Tom looks down at you as he studies your features. You nod, giving him a smile, "Yeah, of course."

He then peppers your face with kisses as you squeal making him laugh. "Are you Tom Blyth?" One of the girls from the group calls out from behind us as we both look back then look at each other. "Busted," He says before he walks fast, his hand pulling you along as you follow him off the bridge.

~

The next morning, you woke up beside Tom, his arm haphazardly thrown across your waist. For some odd reason, you woke up with a weird feeling in your stomach, you just weren't sure why. "Morning," Tom groggily says as you cup his face and place a kiss on his forehead. "Morning," You reply back as a lazy smile makes it to his face.

"You're going to be wearing your locks today," You point out to your boyfriend as he brushes his teeth, your preparing everything you would need to put his wig on. "Great, I get to spend more time with you," He smiles, his toothbrush still in his mouth as you laugh at his cuteness.

When you finish up with his hair and slight makeup, you walk with him to the filming set as you still needed to be with him throughout the day, fixing his hair and makeup throughout the day.

Around lunch time, you felt a buzz from your phone as you see what is was. It was a message from your sister. You and Tom are trending all over tiktok rn. You screw up your eyebrows as you follow the link she sends. Straight away, you recognise the girl to the be the girl who called out to Tom.

You watch the tiktok as she explains how she saw the Tom and a mysterious woman walking on the bridge and how she saw him kissing you, and walking away quickly when she asked if it was him.

She also mentioned that she couldn't quite tell who the mysterious girl was that was locking lips with Tom due to the darkness and the fact that you were wearing a beanie.

You tap on the comment section and scroll through them. A few people immediately saying that it was you since there were already a few pictures released of the two of you together. You couldn't help but notice the hate comments aswell.

Tom always told you to ignore the comments but you couldn't help yourself. You wanted to know what they thought of it, even though it wasn't there business who Tom was dating. The comments stung.

They were the usual, 'she doesn't deserve him,' and the, 'he could do so much better' comments that stabbed you deep. Your mind lingered on it throughout the rest of the day. Tom could tell something was up when you were removing his hair and makeup.

You would usually conversate and laugh about the funny things that happened on set and whatnot, but this time, you were quiet, not really responding. "Darling," Tom grabs your forearm as you were packing up the desk.

"What's wrong? You've been acting strange all afternoon. If there's a problem, you know we can talk about it." He says softly as all you wanted to do was break down and stay in the comfort of his arms. "It's nothing, I'm just really exhausted. That's all," You try to smile, though it doesn't reach your eyes which Tom notices straight away, not buying your excuse.

"You sure?" He watches you as you quickly pack up everything as you smile at him and hum. Tom knew better than to push you and knew that you would tell him when you wanted to.

~

As the two of you did your usual walk around Berlin and buying random things, you were slightly on edge. Always on the lookout to see if there was anyone watching the two of you. You both decided to get some ice cream and waited outside the parlor.

Your head resting on his chest as he rubs circles on your back. Your eyes catch a glimpse of a group of girls walk your direction, whispering and giggling to each other. You instantly move so that Tom's frame was covering you as they walk by.

Tom looks down at you confused and then looks to the group that just walked by. "Y/n," He softly says to you as you don't respond, burying your face deeper in his jacket. "Y/n, please?" You sigh, turning your head to the side.

'"That girl that called out your name last night on the bridge made a tiktok about it and it's circulating around social media-" "Did you read the comments?" Tom blatantly asks.

"W-What?" You meet his eyes, "I said, did you read the comments?" He moves a strand of hair from your face as you sigh in defeat. "Ok- yeah- yeah I did. I couldn't help it!" You sniffle as hugs you tighter.

"Sweetheart, you know I how I don't like you reading those comments. They don't even know you and have absolutely no idea of how a beautiful girlfriend you are. I love you," He whispers as he kisses your forehead.

A single tear rolls down your cheek as he wipes it away. You go on your tippy toes and kiss him. His arm pulls you even closer to him by the waist to deepen the kiss. "I love you too" You whisper against his lips as you both smile.

tomblythupdates

Liked by tomblyth and 4,298,928 people

What did I tell you guys? Tom and Y/n are the cutest 😭 (edited: HE FREAKIN LIKED MY POST)

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user387: my parents <3

user19: the fact that she’s his hair and makeup artist!

user2984: GUYS GUYS GUYS HE LIKED THE POST AHHH

user102: I KNEW SMTH WAS UP WHEN THAT VIDEO OF HIM GETTING HIS HAIR AND MAKEUP DONE WAS RELEASED

[lichenes]

hey could you write joost dating headcanons pls 💗 love ur work !

Thank you anon!! Enjoy <3 CW: kinda ooc... possesiveness, positive vibes overall, smoking wc: 377

•───────•°•❀•°•───────••────────•°•❀•°•────────•

Joost is definitely a touchy feely guy. He’s also a smoker which means passing the cig he’s smoking to you, brushing his fingers against your own and revelling in the feeling. “We should quit.” You say jokingly. He hummed with agreement thinking of how many touches he’d miss out on if you both ever did. 

Joost hugs you from behind a lot putting his chin on your head, especially to show others that you’re his. He’s very protective of you both when it comes to others making unwanted physical contact with you - a touchier friend, a dumb guy in the club - and when envy is in play - a jealous ex, a shitty colleague. 

Joost always makes sure you’re comfortable. “Can we go home please?” You asked when the party was getting too much. “‘course lovely.” He quickly bids everyone goodbye and drives you to your apartment or your shared home where you spend the rest of the night watching dumb comedies and laughing your asses off. 

Joost always shows up for you. As absorbed as he is with his music he always makes time for you, a trip to a cinema, a coffee date or just your day off which you spend curled up in his arms talking about nothing in particular. 

Joost thinks about you constantly. “Heyyy.” He said into the phone, stirring the vegetables in the pan. “Hi lovely!” You exclaimed into the other end. “How’s your day going? I’m just making dinner for when you come back.” You smiled. “‘s going okay. Glad you’re having fun!” The joy was evident in his tone, clearly proud of making you happy. The conversation went on for a while, you could really talk to him about anything without feeling bored.

Joost loved sharing his music with you, whether his own or other people’s, he enjoyed looking at you when he showed you something new. “D’you like it?” You nodded. Something you’d hear at a club in Berlin was flowing through your headphones and since it was recommended by him you loved every second of it. “We need to listen to Aggu’s newest song!” He stopped the track mid through and switched the song. “I’m telling you it’s great!”

Ah Joost Klein the man that you are… 

•───────•°•❀•°•───────••────────•°•❀•°•────────• masterlist

[dodgerkedavra]

Tea-Licious Fic Recs

I was already halfway through this rec list when I realized that, like, MOST of the fics I was looking through would have tea in them, but by then I had already looked up all the cute tea graphics, so GUESS WHAT? I finished it.

Please enjoy these delightful fics by DELIGHTFUL writers which all have TEA ☕️ in them!!

Snow Can Wait by @its-the-allure

Ten years after the war, Harry is on a first date with a cute Muggle bloke attending a classical music recital. But then the house lights go down, and an achingly familiar man with a shock of white-blond hair walks across the stage toward the piano. This is a story about waiting - and making up for lost time.

Got Me Started by @itsphantasmagoria, @kamaela

Malfoy said in a rush, “I don’t care about you.” “Uh, same?” was the only response Harry could come up with. Or: An unexpected partnership leads Harry and Draco to a sex club in Berlin. Harry doesn't quite know what to do with himself.

Birthday Blues by @edieblakee

"How long have you been there?” The door is fully open now, and in it stands Potter: casually leaning against the doorframe, arms in a loose fold. That stupid, half-smile on his face. Draco glares. “Long enough to know you’ve been sat here scowling for a bit.”

where i have to go by @desertforestfic

“So,” Ron murmured, “how was Malfoy last night? You two going to make it through the year without strangling each other?” Harry thought of Malfoy’s bloodless face in the moonlight, the way he’d shaken uncontrollably atop his bedsheets. “Yeah,” he said absently. “Don’t worry about it.” 𓈒⠀𓂃⠀⠀˖⠀𓇬⠀˖⠀⠀𓂃⠀𓈒 Or: assembly instructions for something new in an old place.

when the birds are heard again in their singing by @matredaen

Harry hadn't been able to make it to the Hound and Hare's Thursday Trivia Night, which was a shame because Draco had specifically invited him—but unfortunately the moon waits for no man. Or, well. No wolf. He expects to spend the grey dim light of his Friday morning licking his wounds, both literal and metaphorical. He doesn't expect the barn owl, or the little care package clutched in her talons.

Harry After Healer by @zephyne

Harry’s loopy on potions after his procedure. Draco rather likes Harry this way, all open and innocent and awestruck. Oh—and yeah. Obsessed with Draco’s beauty. That part’s rather nice. “Do we call each other ‘love’? How long have we been together?” “We’ll have been married three years next month,” he replies. “Merlin, I hit the jackpot!” Harry exclaims, beaming.

[svt-luna]

ʚིᵋ ⋆ INSTAGRAM UPDATE ࣪ ! ˓ ౨ৎ ࣪˖ ─── 240925: Blue

╰ ౨ৎ LUNA-VERSE MASTERLIST ╰ ౨ৎ luna's instagram

Liked by jeonghaniyoo_n, min9yu_k, feat.dino, and 4,734,383 others

lunabae something blue 🩵

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babyjijiyeon MRS. YOON!!! HOW UNSERIOUS COULD YOU POSSIBLY FUCKING GET?!?

svtrighthere_ SHE IS ABSOLUTELY SICK IN THE HEAD 🙃

lulunana BSKSHUSHEHAH she cracks me up fr 😂

lunadaily she really just posted this literally MINUTES after we got that fucking confirmation!?!

esther17 FIVE LONG MOTHERFUCKING YEARS! THAT’S HOW LONG YA’LL BEEN TOGETHER?! AND YA’LL ENGANGED TOO!!? I SIMPLY CANNOT WITH THE TWO OF YOU!!!

nana_lulu17 they have managed to break the internet in the span of a few hours and both decided to post on Instagram as if they didn’t… that’s it couple behavior right there.

ddaddu just a few simple questions… FIVE YEARS?! ENGAGED SINCE FUCKING BERLIN!?! AND IS JEONGHAN ALREADY BALD?!?

baebybaeby the caption too I–

ashhhh17 and with that, ladies and gentlemen, Bae Jiyeon became THE military wife 🤭

lunas-closet you look amazing, my love 💕✨

gyugyu_m mom is officially marrying dad 🥹💖

jeongnadaily JEONGNA NATION WE HAVE FUCKING WON!! THIS MIGHT BE THE BEST PIECE OF NEWS I HAVE EVER FUCKING GOTTEN 🎉🎉🎉🎉

napipopeta_ the face card, the body, the outfit… she’s proving to you haters what jeonghan gets on a daily basis 🥵

↳ user24705531 honestly don’t know who I am more jealous of 🙃

↳ moonlightbaby I want to be their third 🤭

xo_xokissme_ the song choice as well 🫠

lunanova09 she knows what’s she’s doing, i mean that caption! you’re getting married to THE Yoon Jeonghan, we get it you won 😭

popipopipopipo Hannie cannot handle all of that 🥵 (I’m totally jealous of him rn)

↳ mimi17 Yoon Jeonghan is the only one who can handle all of that.

jxjforever pledis said they got engaged Sept 8, that’s Berlin… everything makes sense!! them being so smiley during their performance, fans seeing them holding hands in Berlin, LUNA’S FUCKING CAPTION ON HER BERLIN POST!!?

↳ svtforeverfan “berlin you’ll always be my yes, you have my heart always and forevermore, now more than ever 💎🤍” WE HAVE BEEN PLAYED! SHE TOLD US!!

↳ wooowonwoo “always be my yes” IT WAS RIGHT THERE IN FRONT OF OUR EYES 😝

missbitch ARE YOU TELLING ME YOU AND HAN HAVE BEEN DATING FOR FIVE YEARS AND ARE RECENTLY ENGAGED BUT WE WON’T SEE YOU TWO TOGETHER FOR TWO FUCKING YEARS?!! I AM UNWELL.

sonogong17 can jeonghan fight?

↳ shadowmyshadow like a fist fight? No. He might poison you in your sleep and get away with it tho.

↳ hanniehaeee02 ^^^ this is so Yoon Jeonghan coded. Literally something he is capable of doing 🤣

ೃ⁀➷ comment or message me to be added to the tag list :)

˚₊· ͟͟͞͞➳❥ SUBMIT A REQUEST AND ASK ME ANYTHING!

: ̗̀➛ requests are always open ♡ - lunaఌ

Taglist: @yeoberryx @minminghao @angie-x3 @jennwonwoo @k13endall @heeseungthel0ml @chisskaa @megumi2020 @yoonzzziino @lllucere @smh-anon @yveclipse @randomworker @bunnystrm @iamawkwardandshy @gratefulbunny1 @bmo-bri @syren-ash @megseungmin @multiplums @unlikelysublimekryptonite @night-storm7 @cookiearmy @seokqt @btskzfav @billboard-singer @junhuisworld @caturdayvibe @coralbatlampzonk @sof1eya @lyraea

[orengejoshi]

Hey! I was wondering since you said that English isn’t your first language and all and the translation thing (Which is totally fine btw! I’m the same way) …

What is your first language? Sorry if this is like too personal, but I’m genuinely really curious!

Ich spreche normalerweise deutsch

Berliner/Sächsischer dialekt mix

my brain also gets confused bc I can speak a little bit of many languages. spanish namely, also simple french, dutch and japanese

paperhat in german would be eons better than in english, bc Flug has to use the formal "you" for Black Hat. and he would. he would (have to) continue even once they are together bc he probably demands it. Black Hat could use it for Flug (should, under normal circumstances of the rule) but most likely doesn't respect him enough for that. it strengthens the power imbalance soo much bc it is ALWAYS mutual irl.

this is indescribably ancient so it's really bad [the text is NSFWish]

commonly, only the older one can offer the informal "you" to another person. it would be high praise and trust to get the offer from your boss.

if your language doesn't have that layer of politeness you don't understand how much tension and power there is behind even a simple casual conversation, it's so appealing ughh (if you use it in a ship. bc you never use it in your private life, not even when you meet someone you date for the first time. it's just strange to use for a partner whether long-term or one-night. paperhat would be a quite unique case.)

[lisenberry]

Fluffy fluff.

CW: Pregnancy and child birth, language

Ch.2, Ch.3 Ch.4

You knew this day would come. Your due date wasn’t until the following week, but as of your last check-up, the midwife didn’t think you would make it that long.

But you were still surprised, and fought a rising panic, when you woke up around dawn to your first set of contractions. They weren’t terrible, at first, and you tried to remain calm as you showered, dressed in the comfortable outfit you’d set aside and checked your hospital bag for the thousandth time since you’d packed it weeks ago.

You’d read all of the books and watched all of the videos. It was a long process, and there was no rush to get to the hospital at this stage. It could be hours, days even before anything happened.

You were completely prepared and in control.

Until you stepped out into your hallway and straight into the wall of heat and muscle that was your neighbor.

“Oh, hi, John. I didn’t know you were back.” It’d been over a year since he’d left.

Why on earth he kept such an expensive apartment when he hardly ever lived in it, you couldn’t understand. He’d lived across the hall for five years, and had spent less than six months total sleeping in his bed.

And every so often, when it worked out, in yours.

“I got in late last night.” He paused, brows drawn together as he took in your obvious condition. “I was just heading to the gym.”

Jesus, he looked so good. Even in track shorts and a hooded sweatshirt. It pulled tightly across his chest as he rocked back on his heels. No doubt doing the quick math as to whether or not he could be responsible.

“I’m headed to have a baby,” you huffed out, as a sudden rush of spasming pain in your back nearly keeled you over.

That was a new feeling. It felt urgent. Shit, maybe you should’ve left sooner.

“Right now?” He lunged to grab your bags from your arms as you leaned against the wall for support.

“Not yours, don’t worry.” You laughed up at him, in an attempt to lighten the awkwardness of the exchange.

“Can I call someone for you?”

“I called a cab. It’s on its way.” The pressure started to ebb as you chanced a few steps towards the stairs.

“A cab? Absolutely not, I’ll drive you.”

“No, please. It’s fine. I have a plan. It’s all going to plan.”

But he’d taken possession of your hospital bag and your diaper bag, and had them loaded into the boot of his truck before you could protest.

“Is your boy—the father meeting you there?” Once he’d hoisted you into the passenger seat, and started the engine, he finally asked the question that had been left hanging between you.

“He’s not in the picture.”

Never was, you didn’t add. After you’d convinced yourself it would never work out between you and John, you'd had a brief fling with a visiting colleague from Berlin.

Imagine your surprise when you found out you were pregnant a month after he’d finished the project and gone home. To his wife, you found out later.

“You’re doing this alone?”

“It’s going to be fine. I told you, I have a plan.”

**********

“You don’t have to stay, really. I can do this on my own.” The contractions had become so intense, you couldn't control your voice enough to sound convincing.

His sympathetic smile as he finished filling out your intake paperwork was purely to placate. He had no intention of leaving. And you were grateful for his help.

The fact that he knew so much about you to only need to ask a few questions when completing the never-ending forms should’ve been alarming, not comforting.

Your blood type? Had you ever told him that?

“Aren’t you preregistered? How many times have you had to give them the same information?” He drew his eyebrows together in frustration as he realized the next packet was double sided.

“A fucking thousand.” You focused on your breathing and fought the waves of nausea that seemed to get worse along with the pain.

Weren’t there supposed to be breaks? You were told there would be breaks. You barely got a second to unclench your fists before another one started again.

You stood too quickly and steadied yourself with a hand to his shoulder.

“Where are you going?” Concerned, he stood with you.

“I’m going to be sick.” You rushed, or rather waddled at your fastest pace, to the nearby family restroom and he trailed along close behind.

He stopped momentarily at the triage desk to slap the clipboard down and boom something about needing a room immediately, before following you in and holding your hair back as you wretched into the toilet.

“Shhh, I’ve got you.” He soothed, as he rubbed your back and passed you a wad of tissue.

“Please don’t leave me,” you croaked out, tears flowing at your helplessness and the sudden realization that this was only the beginning. That your life would never be the same.

“Careful what you wish for, darling.”

Once you were admitted to a room and set up with effective pain management, you finally relaxed enough to get your wits about you. And that involved, in no small part, frequently reminding the staff that, no, John was not your husband. He wasn’t even the father.

He wasn’t nearly as dedicated to correcting them as you were.

Things seemed to happen quickly, although you’d find out later that you labored well into the night, with a tireless, supporting hand held firmly in yours.

“You did so good, love.” When it was all over, he wiped a sweaty, wayward lock of hair from your cheek and planted a kiss on the top of your head. Seemingly as relieved as you were. As if he’d been holding his breath along side you.

You missed the look the nurse gave you as she placed the squirming infant on your chest, nor did you hear her mutter under her breath, “Not the father, my ass.”

“Welcome to the world, sweetheart,” you cooed, the pain quickly forgotten as you felt a tremendous sense of peace. Clarity.

“And welcome home, John.”

[judecole]

caught on film. cp20

pairing: you x cole palmer

summery: you’re a famous retired footballers daughter and have been dating cole for a few months. the media hasn’t caught on to your relationship just yet but your appearance at the euros final in a certain players shirt causes quite the stir.

word count: 2114

authors note: idk

THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION.

You’re not exactly sure what you did in your past life to end up here, in this beautiful grand hotel in central Berlin. Despite your luxurious lifestyle, being born with a silver spoon in your mouth and having everything you ever wanted, you never took a single thing for granted. The hotel foyer is vast and grand, great marble columns dwarfing everyone in sight and traditional historic paintings in huge gold frames hanging on every wall. It’s beautiful. You stay in these kinds of hotels regularly but they never cease to amaze you. Your family PA is checking you and your family into the hotel as the several concierges begin collecting your luggage. You smile warmly at them and thank them before the manager greets you to show you to your suites. As soon as you enter your room you lay flat out on the bed, exhausted from your day travelling. You’d been flying back and forth from the UK to Germany for the last month. Any major footballing tournaments were a big deal in your family, you’ve been to pretty much every one since you were born. You can remember being a small child, wearing a shirt with your father’s name and number on the back and feeling so proud every time he stepped on the pitch. However now, things were a bit different. Your family were now invited as special guests and given all the best treatment, a private box in the stands where members of staff would meet your every need. You did truly feel blessed and very appreciative for everything your parents had done for you and your siblings.

You pull your phone out from your trouser pocket and check for any messages. Nothing. You bite your lip and open up iMessage and clicking on Cole’s name. You had been dating Cole for about six months. Things were going very well for the two of you, your parents loved him, especially your dad who was amazed by his talent on the pitch. You’d initially met him when he played at Manchester City after being invited to watch an U21’s match. You loved his laid back style and calm manor when he was playing. You smile as you remember the first time you spoke to him, all sweaty after the game. You’d gone down with your dad to congratulate the boys on their win and chatted with them. You swear you’d fallen for him right then and there, not being able to get his stupid grin out of your head. You begin typing a message to him when your younger sister walked into your room, plopping herself next to you on the bed. “You texting Cole?” She asks, a smirk on her face. She loved to wind you up about your relationship with the football player, often saying that the pair of you made her feel sick. You roll your eyes before replying, “Yeah, I’m gonna see what he’s doing after training.” You type out the message, “I know ur probably training rn but what are u doing tonight? I wanna see youuuu.’

You place your phone down on the bed and lay back, resting your head on the soft pillows. “Are you nervous about tomorrow? I hope Cole gets to play.” Your sister says, actually not being mean or sarcastic for once. “Yeah. I hope he does too.” You hear your phone ding. Picking it up, Cole’s name flashes on the screen. ‘Defo getting an early night but i can see you in the afternoon. Love ya.’ You smile at the words. You know how serious he takes his job, but he never fails to make time for you too. You text him back quickly and lay back again, smiling. “You’re so in love with him it’s gross.” Your sister playfully hits your arm causing you to slap her back.

A few hours later you’re getting ready to head to the England Squads hotel, a little trip planned by your father’s management team that conveniently lined up with your plans to meet Cole that afternoon. Your mum comes in to your room as you’re putting on some makeup and compliments your outfit, a simple pair of jeans and a top that was sent to you by a company that no doubt cost more than a night in the hotel itself. You smile and thank her, pulling her into a gentle side hug as she kisses your head. Your mum was definitely surprised when you told her about your relationship with Cole. Given your previous dating history he would never had been your type. But there was just something about him that instantly pulled you in, you still don’t know what it was to this day but you weren’t complaining.

Arriving at the squads hotel you check your hair and makeup in a compact mirror, brushing a few stray hairs into place with your nails. Your sister rolls her eyes, something that had now become the norm and makes a comment under her breath you can’t really hear. You get out the car and are greeted by some of the staff who lead you in through the hotels modern entrance. The hotel looked more like a spa than a hotel, every piece of furniture placed exactly, in a way to promote relaxation. You follow through the entrance into a board room, filled with players, staff and other prolific footballing legends and their families. You scan the crowd, looking for Cole. It doesn’t take you long as you see your dad pulling him in for a hug and patting him on the back, obviously congratulating him on reaching the finals. You grin as lock eyes with him, quickly wrapping your arms around him. He places a kiss to the top of your head, surprising you. He wasn’t the biggest fan of PDA, even the smallest things like holding hands made him panic. Maybe it was the fact you were one of the most famous people in the world which constantly occurred to him but never to you. You noticed some eyes laying on the pair of you which made you release him. You quickly returned to your professional manner and wished him good luck before finding your mum. She nudges you and gives you a cheeky smile when you reach her. “You two are silly. Why does it matter if anyone finds out?” She says. “It’s not that. I want to be public with him but not now. I want him to focus on football and I don’t want the media circus for him right now.” You say and give her a small smile. “Well that’s very thoughtful of you but make sure you’re public before Christmas because I’m not editing him out of the Instagram pictures.” She wraps an arm round you as you approach more people and chat about the final tomorrow.

Later that night after an expensive dinner in a posh restaurant near the squads hotel, you text Cole and tell him you want to see him before he goes to bed. He replies almost immediately and you ask your driver to wait outside the hotel and that you were just going to take a quick walk. You could see his tall figure on approach which made you speed up, not wanting to waste any more time not having his arms around you. “Hey.” He says softly when you reach him, extending his arms out and enveloping you in them. “Hey.” You almost whisper. “Wanna go for a walk?” You nod your head and begin walking hand in hand. It was dark now but the city of Berlin was still bustling, what with the warm weather. You walk past busy restaurants and bars packed with what you could only assume were England fans based on the noise. Cole squeezes your hand every so often, he can feel his palms become clammy when you look up at him. He still couldn’t believe his luck. After the first time he met you he couldn’t get you out of his mind. He was glad you made the first move though, otherwise you probably wouldn’t have been in this position now. Once you reach somewhere quieter Cole lets go of your hand and wraps his arm around your shoulder, pressing a kiss to your temple at the same time. “Are you nervous about tomorrow?” You ask him. You almost knew what he was about to say, “Not really. You know me.” He cracks a smile.

“I hope Southgate plays you, Cold Palmer.” You joke and poke his side playfully. “Me too. Hopefully I’ll get some time.” You end up sitting on a bench overlooking a river, the hustle and bustle far behind you now. “It’s really pretty here.” You mutter. “Not as pretty as you.” He winks as you roll your eyes. You continue talking for a while before Cole regretfully tells you it’s getting late and he probably needs to head back now. He places a quick peck on your lips and stands up, offering you a hand. “I’m so excited for tomorrow. Are you gonna score a goal for me Palmer?” You tease as you approach the hotel. He shakes his head at you and smiles. When you return to the hotel entrance he turns to face you, you look up at him and he swears his heart starts beating a hundred times faster. “I’ll see you after the game, okay? I love you.” He places a soft kiss on your lips making you blush. “Good luck babe. I love you too. You’re gonna smash it.” You wave him goodbye and open the door of the car, getting in and thank your driver for waiting.

You wake up the next morning with a nervous feeling in your tummy. It sticks around for pretty much the whole day. You feel especially nervous when getting dressed. You grabbed your England shirt that you’d hung carefully in the hotel wardrobe and put it on, turning around in the mirror to see the back. You’d always wanted to wear his shirt to a game. You snap a quick picture and keep it for later, maybe to post on Instagram. You knew the absolute carnage that would take place when you did. You arrive at the Olympiastadion Berlin in your families usual fashion, through the back in all blacked out vehicles with staff waiting for you at the other end. The nerves had well and truly kicked in now. You check your phone to see if Cole had texted you. You knew he wouldn’t be nervous, very sure in himself and the team’s quality but you wanted him to text you to ease your nerves. Your dad shook the hands of the staff that greeted you and you thanked them as they took you all up to your private box. You were sharing with a few other well known people, you eagerly greeted them with big smiles.

(We all know how the game went so we’ll just leave it at that.)

A devastating loss for England. You were gutted. But also immensely proud of Cole. He’d been subbed on in the seventieth minute and scored only three minutes later. The only goal for England that game. You headed down to the pitch once everything had calmed down and spotted Cole in the stands with his family. His eyes were glassy with tears as he spoke to his dad. You approach slowly and he notices you, standing up immediately and wrapping you in a tight hug. You could hear the snapping of cameras behind you but neither of you cared in that moment. “I’m sorry baby.” You spoke quietly as you pulled away, cupping one side of his face with your hand. “You were amazing.” He sniffled slightly, trying not to cry in front of you but failing miserably as he pulled you in again. You rubbed his back reached up to kiss his cheek. His dad walked towards the both of you and pats Cole on the back before sitting with Cole’s mum. “I can’t believe we lost.” He reaches up to dry his eyes as you pout and rub his arm. You turn around slightly hearing his sister call your name. “Love your shirt.” He smirks a bit, it clearly cheering him up. He wraps his arm around your shoulder as you begin chatting with his sister.

You’re on your way back to your hotel when your phone begins to blow up. Story after story about your relationship with Cole, using the picture they clearly got when you were consoling him after the game. You save the picture, setting it as your lockscreen and then posting the picture of you in his shirt from earlier to your Instagram story.

[rose24207]

Roseee‘s Masterlist pt. 2

ℕ𝕒𝕧𝕚𝕘𝕒𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟

𝖦𝖾𝗇𝗋𝖾

Mafia - 🖤 Angst - 💔 Fluff - 💗 Suggestive - ❤️‍🔥 Dark - 🩶

Humor - 💛

The Mazerunner

Minho

• send Minho

-> The Glade boys keep getting rejected by you—leader of the ultra-organized girls’ camp—until they send Minho, who surprisingly wins you over, leaving everyone stunned and teasing him relentlessly as he becomes their unofficial envoy.

Teen Wolf

• This is pushing it 💗

-> A shy but powerful witch surprises Scott’s pack by proving she’s their best chance against a rogue alpha.

Harry Potter

Fred Weasley

• I’ve got you 💗💔

-> Fred comforts you after your traumatic experience with Umbridge

George Weasley

• not until you 💗

-> At Hogwarts, George makes you realize that home isn’t a place—it’s being with him.

Formula one

Daniel Riccardo

• Professional, huh? 💗❤️‍🔥

-> An innocent late-night work session turns into a passionate encounter when Daniel finally acts on the tension between him and his assistant, breaking all professional boundaries.

Max Verstappen

• “Problem?“ “Not yet“ 💗❤️‍🔥

-> As Red Bull’s social media manager, you’ve become Yuki’s safe space—and now everyone on the grid wants your attention, including one very possessive Max Verstappen.

• Lacy 💔💗

-> You’ve loved Max your whole life, watching in silent heartbreak as he falls for the impossibly perfect Lacy

• "you piss me off“ "good“ 💔❤️‍🔥

-> Max, the reigning king of illegal street racing, finds his world turned upside down when a fierce rival—you—steals his wins

• It’s not enough 💔💗🖤

-> After a brutal attack on his pregnant girlfriend, Mafia Max goes to extreme lengths to ensure her and their baby's safety, revealing the depths of his love and protection.

Oscar Piastri

• No distractions 💔💗🖤

-> In a world where attachments are dangerous, you and Oscar fight to ignore the growing tension between you—until a life-or-death mission forces a kiss that feels far too real to be just a distraction.

Lando Norris

• I‘m not gentle 💔❤️‍🔥

-> In a cold, arranged marriage with Lando Norris, you try to bury your feelings—until jealousy over his mistress ignites a fiery confrontation

• Leave her alone 💔

-> At the Australian Grand Prix, you’re forced to face Lando Norris—the ex who cheated on you and broke your heart—while trying to keep the peace as Oscar Piastri’s sister around the paddock

• Trust is fragile 💔💗

-> Lando neglects you to help an old female friend, but when you get close to another man to “even the score,” he realizes what he’s been risking.

• The best part 💗

-> Years after marrying a princess, retired villain Lando tells their daughter a bedtime story about “a fearsome villain and the beautiful princess who ruined everything.”

• Miss and Mister Norris? 💗

-> You teach biology. He teaches PE. You’re secretly dating. The students? Not fooled for a second.

• Broken 💔

-> Lando’s need for secrecy strains his relationship with you, leading to a heated confrontation that nearly ends things between you.

• I am possessive 💔❤️‍🔥🩶

-> After seeing you dance with another man at a club, a jealous and possessive Lando confronts you in a heated argument that leads to an intense, passionate turn.

• no wall is strong enough to keep us apart 💔💗

-> A family torn apart by the Berlin Wall reunites in an emotional embrace the night it falls, proving that love endures even the strongest barriers.

• Me? Dramatic?! 💗💔💛

-> You prank Lando by ignoring him to see how long it takes for him to get upset. Spoiler: it doesn’t take long

• My everything 💔💗🖤

-> After discovering that Lando had only pursued you to investigate your family, your heart shatters—but as you try to walk away, his desperate pleas and undeniable love make you question if, despite everything, you can ever stop loving him.

• knew you couldn’t resist me, sugar 💗💔

-> You try to resist bad-boy Lando Norris, but when he corners you behind the bleachers, smirking in his leather jacket and telling you he’s taking you to the dance, you know you’re already his.

• love isn’t always enough 💔

-> Your love with Lando falls apart as unresolved pain drives you both away from each other.

• Never going to be love 💔

-> After falling for Lando, you confront him about his flirtations and walk away when he can’t return your feelings.

• Are you hurt? 🖤💔💗

-> After a chilling note reveals you're being watched and an intruder invades your home, Lando arrives just in time to ruthlessly kill the attacker and protect you.

• I mean it, love 🖤💔💗

-> Lando warns you not to touch the mysterious box on his desk, but when you do, you unknowingly mark yourself for death—forcing him to protect you at all costs

• on your own 🖤💔💗

-> Kidnapped after a fight, you learn the hard way—leaving Lando after a fight was a mistake.

• my dad is a dumbass 💗

-> Lucas is sent back in time to ensure his teenage father falls for his outcast mother instead of the wrong girl.

-> p2

• like a kiss 💗

-> after coming to terms that his girlfriend is a ghost, a new routine builds.

• dtMF 💔

-> Lando sits on a San Juan beach, holding a Polaroid camera, reflecting on his lost love and regretting the moments he took for granted, wishing he could tell her he still loves her.

• an angel 💔💗

-> guilt eats Lando alive when he wants to come clean to you after dating you for a bet. What he didn’t expect was that you would be so understanding and calm about it.

• I’ve missed this 💔💗

-> Lando confesses his love on midsummer night but pushes you away for years before finally apologizing and winning you back.

• two pink lines 💗🖤

-> When Y/N suspects she might be pregnant, she tries to hide her worries from Lando, only to take a test and confirm her life is about to change forever.

• AHHH..! 💛💗

-> Lando panics mid-stream over his girlfriend’s scream, only to find she’s overreacting to a horror game.

• hyperpigmentation 💛

-> you son‘s drawing sparks chaos as Lando laughs hysterically, and you scramble to boost Jacob’s confidence.

• Anything for you 💔🩶

-> A devoted girlfriend takes deadly measures against anyone who ruins Lando's career, believing her actions are for his benefit, until he discovers the horrifying truth.

• I can’t pretend 💔💗

-> After weeks of distance, Lando's jealousy ignites when you kiss another guy at a party.

• I know I‘m yours 🖤

-> Lando's jealousy boils over at a gala when a stranger gets too close to you, prompting him to assertively remind you—and everyone else—that you’re his.

Taglist: @ipushhimback, @ladyoflynx, @lewishamiltonismybf, @cmleitora, @hmma3 , @same1995, @amatswimming, @llando4norris, @dr3wstarkey, @hurtblossom, @ernegren, @esposamultifandom, @darleneslane

[folkloresthings]

BECAUSE I LIKED A BOY / CL16.

in which the world’s favourite pop princess becomes tangled in the life of a certain formula one driver, flipping her entire world upside down.

( charles leclerc x singer!au )

track one: lonesome. track two: fast times. track three: nonsense. track four: opposite. track five: how many things. track six: bad for business.

✩⡱ warnings: some swearing, sexual reference

IMESSAGE.

INSTAGRAM.

liked by y/nupdates, exhalesss, and 3,297 others

y/nontour y/n in berlin tonight 🫶

view all 528 comments

user she’s so slay

user the fact she was crying during the next song too 😭

user poor girl’s had her heart broken twice in the space of six months

user charles done fucked up big time

touring through heartbreak was quite possibly the hardest thing to be done. city after city, having to get on stage every night with a smile on your face, all while wondering what you had done wrong. thankfully, your fans were as supportive when you were sad as they were when you were happy.

but you’d never felt lonelier. after three years of a relationship with austin, you were sure you could never trust another like that again. and mere weeks later came charles leclerc, snatching up your heart and making you blind to any hurt you’d felt before. you were brand new with him, and he had trampled it under his pretty foot.

curled up on the bed of this week’s hotel, an old rerun playing mindlessly on the television, you stared straight ahead at the wall — only pulled out of such a trance when a knock sounded at the door. thinking it was only room service, you dragged yourself to the door’s entrance, only to find lewis hamilton stood on the other side.

“lew? what are you doing here?” you questioned, brows knitting together. he stepped inside, not saying a word other than pulling you into a hug. if it weren’t for the fact you were dried of tears, you’d have broken down.

“thought you could use a friend,” he told you, a fond smile on his face. but there was something in his eyes, something he was battling with. “but, about charles… i really think you should hear him out.”

“lewis, please don’t.”

“he fucked up, i know that. but i saw him with that girl the night of the party. he was practically trying to shove her off of him, and when he knew you’d been and left he went straight after you.”

you were crying now, afraid of what the real truth was. “what about the picture of him and her leaving together?”

“come on, y/n. you know the media better than anyone. she probably followed him out and they’ve made it look like something different.”

you sighed, leaning your head against your friend’s shoulder. your chest was heavy with a decision to be made. the risk of trusting him again, of trusting anyone, only to be caught up in a vicious cycle of heartbreak.

INSTAGRAM.

liked by maisiehpeters, noahkahan, and 882,408 others

yourusername life lately ❤️‍🩹 oh and my new single “opposite” is out now btw

view all 601,827 comments

zendaya new music!!! my life is improved

user a song after the charles drama??? TEA

lizzo pop off queen 👑

lilymhe how can you still look so pretty when crying 💔💔💔

user charles leclerc better count his days

TWITTER.

IMESSAGE.

writers note: it’s concerning how attached i am to this parasocial relationship. petition for sab and charles to date because they’d be such a sexy couple

tagged: @leclercloml @vroomleclerc @gaviypedrisbride

[random-brushstrokes]

Christian Schad - Sonja (1928)

Sonja, the secretary, frequented the famous artists' and writers' meeting place of the "Romanisches Café" at the Memorial Church, which also forms the backdrop for her portrait. The "close-up" of an emancipated Berlin employee, dressed up in her black smock dress with a silk scarf, with shimmering skin on her upper arm, her legs casually crossed, the cigarette holder in her graceful hand, "Camel" is up to date. A woman's face, austere, stern and boyishly beautiful: black-brown bobbed hair with languid curls falling over her forehead, the wave of sharply erased eyebrows above the large, shadowed eyes. Next to the phallic bottle neck on Sonja's shoulder is an open, pink silk camellia, a hint of erotic flair. Two men sit behind the melancholy, wide-awake beauty of the night. The only cropped bald man is the poet Max-Herrmann Neisse, a "nosferatu"-like figure with a bizarre bat ear. With him, "in this picture, Sonja is given a reference to a bar with a somewhat literary atmosphere - and thus to the circle in which the 'other' Berliner felt at home." (Christian Schad). With his Sonja, Christian Schad portrayed a Berlin woman "in front of" the men: young, intelligent, fashionable, beautiful and self-confident. An urban beauty that also commands distance in its delicately frosty coolness. In this timeless "class woman" from a simple background, despite all the new-objective zeitgeist of the "Golden Twenties", there is also something of the aristocratism of Joan of Aragon, which Schad appreciated so much in Raffaelo Santi and the painters of the Renaissance. With his exemplary urban plant of the Berliner "Sonja", Schad gives a cool, probing type portrait that goes beyond the specifically individual, but in which the social characterization is deliberately left out: "My interest lies in the inner being of people. I am less interested in the pragmatic, external events. " (source)

[97linelover]

The Idol‘s Encore - Choi Seungcheol

summary: meeting an idol was crazy enough, but getting close to him,makes it all even crazier.

content: Idol scoups x non Idol reader, fight,angst, sad end,fluff,smut, drama, heartbreak I’m sorrryyyy

wc: 1.5 k

a/n: I really think that’s how it goes. Dating in this business? Hard.

Lollapalooza was unreal and Cheol looked so so so good!!!

As you navigated through the bustling stadium, weaving through the throngs of fans, you followed closely behind your best friend, who was practically sprinting toward the stage. The entire place was alive with energy, people running and shouting, excitement buzzing in the air like an electric current. The fanbase was wild, and it was barely 11 a.m.

You somehow made it to the barricade, squeezing through the sea of people — all of this, for her. The things you did for your best friend. The heat was intense, the sun already blazing down, and there were no clouds to offer any relief.

Your best friend, always the social butterfly, was already chatting animatedly with a few others nearby. They were all Carats, all equally thrilled to be there. You stood beside her, nodding along, but truthfully, you were just hoping the time would pass quickly. Concerts weren’t really your thing, and although you liked the occasional song, this wasn't your scene.

But to your surprise, the crowd was lively yet well-behaved, and time seemed to move faster than you expected. The acts were fantastic — energetic, polished, and engaging. The organization was impeccable too. Staff moved through the crowd, offering free water and ice cream to keep everyone cool under the scorching sun. It was a thoughtful gesture, and it made the heat more bearable.

As the opening notes of the music filled the air, the crowd exploded into cheers and screams. Fans around you were losing their minds, singing along at the top of their lungs. You couldn’t help but laugh softly to yourself, amused by their enthusiasm. You weren’t as familiar with the songs, only knowing a handful of them, but there was one person on stage that you knew all too well.

Choi Seungcheol.

He commanded the stage effortlessly. His sleeveless shirt clung to his toned arms, revealing his muscles as he moved. The way he looked out over the crowd, scanning it with an intensity that seemed purposeful, sent a small shiver down your spine. His eyes swept over hundreds of faces, and then, as if by fate, they found yours.

The instant his gaze locked onto you, you saw something change in his expression. His eyes brightened, and for a moment, it felt like time slowed down. He started to make his way down from the stage, stepping right up to the barricade — right in front of you.

He sang directly to you, his voice rich and powerful, never breaking eye contact. The fans around you screamed louder, sensing something special in the moment, but you barely noticed them. It was like the world had shrunk down to just the two of you.

He had found you. And you knew exactly what that meant.

Tonight, at 10 p.m., you would meet him at the park near his hotel.

But how had all this happened?

It started just a few days ago. Your sister had been at a K-pop party that Saturday night while you had decided to wander around Berlin. You’d had a craving for donuts and hot chocolate, so you found yourself in a quaint little café, settling down with your book. The smell of fresh pastries filled the air, and marshmallows floated in your steaming cup of hot chocolate as you opened the first chapter.

The bell above the café door jingled softly, and you glanced up to see a tall, handsome man walk in. You tried to refocus on your book, not wanting to be rude, but you couldn’t help overhearing the interaction at the counter. The cashier was struggling with English, and it was clear the man didn’t speak German.

With a sigh, you closed your book and stood up, walking over to the counter. “What do you want? I can order it in German for you,” you said with a small smile.

He looked relieved, smiling back at you. “I was just trying to order a water.”

“A water? Do you know it’s basically a rule to drink hot chocolate at this time of night?” you teased, laughing a little.

“I’m on a strict diet,” he said, pouting slightly.

“Not tonight,” you grinned. “I’m ordering you a hot chocolate. No arguments.”

He chuckled but didn’t resist. “If you insist.”

After placing the order, you paid for his drink and a donut, feeling a bit mischievous. As you turned back to him, you introduced yourself. “I’m Y/N, by the way.”

“I’m Seungcheol,” he replied, and your eyes widened in recognition.

Of course — the handsome stranger, the strict diet — it was your sister’s bias, Choi Seungcheol.

“You know who I am, don’t you?” he asked softly, a hint of something like disappointment in his voice.

You nodded. “Yeah, my sister’s a fan. We’re actually here for your concert.” You took a sip of your hot chocolate, trying to keep things casual.

“And you?” he asked, raising an eyebrow. “Are you a fan too?”

You shook your head with a smile. “Not exactly. I’m just here for my sister. I know a few of your songs, but I’m not a big fan.”

His grin widened. “Well, I’ll take that as a compliment. At least you’ve heard of us.” He took a bite of the donut and sighed dramatically. “This is going to cost me an extra mile on my run tomorrow.”

You laughed. “Don’t stress about it. One donut won’t ruin you.”

Seungcheol looked thoughtful for a moment, then said, “You know, we’re always filmed from every angle. It messes with your mind sometimes, seeing all these sides of yourself that you don’t like.”

“I don’t think you have any bad sides,” you said, half-joking but also flirtatious, and he chuckled, wiggling his eyebrows.

“You think I’m good-looking?” he teased.

“As if you don’t already know that, Seungcheol,” you retorted, standing up to grab your bag.

“Leaving already?” he asked, quickly getting to his feet to follow you.

“I was planning on walking around a bit more. You’re welcome to join me if you want.”

He didn’t hesitate, and the two of you spent the rest of the night wandering through the quiet streets of Berlin. Time flew by as you talked, eventually finding yourselves at a small playground, where you lay side by side on the swings, gazing up at the stars.

“Will you be at the show tomorrow?” he asked softly, turning his head to look at you.

You nodded. “I’ll be there with my sister. She wants to be up front, so I guess I’ll be at the barricade.”

His eyes darkened with a playful intensity. “So, you’ll be watching me from up close, huh?” His hand gently brushed your cheek, sending a shiver down your spine. “I’ll make you a deal. If I find you in the crowd tomorrow, we’ll meet here again at 10 p.m., and... I’ll get my kiss.”

You gasped, cheeks flushing. “You want that kiss so badly?”

“You have no idea,” he murmured, and you found yourself nodding.

“Deal.”

Now, just a few hours after the concert, you sat on the swing at the playground, replaying concert videos on your phone. He was half an hour late.

With a sigh, you put your phone away, feeling a sinking disappointment. Of course, you’d been foolish to think this could be real. Seungcheol was an idol — why would he be interested in someone like you?

As you walked away, you muttered under your breath, “Stupid. Stupid boys, stupid me.”

You were halfway back to the hotel when you felt a hand grab your arm, pulling you into the shadows. “I’m so sorry,” a familiar deep voice said.

You looked up, heart pounding. “Seungcheol?”

“I’m so fucking sorry,” he whispered. “We got held up with interviews, and when I finally got to the playground, you were gone. I had to find you.”

“I thought you played me,” you admitted softly, trying to hide the hurt.

“Never,” he said firmly. “I wanted to see you more than anything.”

You leaned closer to him, whispering, “Did anyone follow you?” He shook his head, his expression soft yet intense.

Without another word, you closed the distance between you, pressing your lips to his. The moment his hands pulled you closer, your heart raced, and your mind went quiet. His lips moved in perfect rhythm with yours, and the world around you seemed to disappear. That kiss—it made you feel alive in a way you hadn’t before.

He pulled away just enough to whisper against your lips, “Do you want to come upstairs? Fans could show up any minute now.”

You nodded, breathless. “Sure.”

You followed him through the quiet corridors, the space between you feeling like too much. The air was thick with tension and anticipation, every step increasing your need to be close to him again.

The door to his room had barely closed behind you before he had you against the wall, his hands exploring, his lips on yours again, more urgent this time. Every touch was electrifying, every kiss deepened the connection between you. It wasn’t just physical—it was intense, overwhelming, and all-consuming.

Time blurred as you spent the night tangled together, losing yourselves in each other. Moments of tenderness and passion intertwined as you explored each other’s bodies, finding new ways to make each other smile, gasp, and laugh. The intimacy was raw, yet filled with affection. By the time Seungcheol finally fell asleep, he was wrapped around you, his breathing soft and steady as he rested his head against your chest.

You lay there, your hand gently stroking his hair, your heart still racing from everything that had just happened. It wasn’t just about the physical connection—it was the unexpected bond that had formed between the two of you.

As the first light of dawn began to filter through the curtains, you stirred awake. Seungcheol was still asleep, his arms wrapped tightly around you, his breathing slow and peaceful. For a moment, everything felt perfect—like a dream you never wanted to end.

But as you lay there, reality started to creep in. The world outside this room was different, harsher. Seungcheol wasn’t just any man; he was an idol, adored by millions. And you… you were just a girl from Germany, someone who had stumbled into his life by accident.

You sighed softly, careful not to wake him. It was easy to get lost in the fantasy here, in the quiet intimacy of the early morning, but what would happen when you left this room? He had a life in South Korea—a public, highly scrutinized life. And you? You had your life in Germany, far away from the spotlight and the complexities of fame.

Seungcheol stirred beside you, his eyes slowly fluttering open. He smiled sleepily, pulling you closer. “Good morning,” he whispered, his voice still heavy with sleep.

You smiled back, but the weight in your chest only grew heavier. "Good morning."

For a moment, you stayed there, wrapped in each other, neither wanting to face the inevitable. But as much as you wanted to stay in this perfect moment forever, you knew the conversation couldn’t wait.

“We need to talk,” you said softly, pulling back just enough to look him in the eyes.

Seungcheol frowned slightly, sensing the seriousness in your tone. “What’s wrong?”

You bit your lip, unsure of how to start. “This… last night, it was incredible. But you know we can’t keep this up, right? You’re an idol, Seungcheol. You live in Korea. And I… I’m just a girl from Germany.”

He sat up, his expression darkening. “What are you saying? That last night didn’t mean anything?”

“No, it meant everything,” you quickly reassured him. “That’s the problem. It meant too much. But you and I… we live in two different worlds. How can we possibly make this work? We just met, you don’t know me and I don’t know you“

Seungcheol ran a hand through his hair, frustration building in his eyes. “I don’t care about the distance. I don’t care about what anyone else thinks. I want to be with you.”

Tears stung your eyes as you shook your head. “But it’s not just about us, is it? You know how it is for idols. The fans, the media… if they found out, it would destroy you. It would ruin everything you’ve worked for.”

He clenched his fists, his jaw tightening. “I don’t care about any of that. I’ve spent my whole life doing what’s expected of me. For once, I want to do what I want.”

“But at what cost?” you asked, your voice breaking. “Do you really want to throw everything away for me? For someone who lives on the other side of the world?”

Silence hung between you, thick and suffocating. Seungcheol’s eyes softened, the fight draining out of him as the reality of your words sank in.

“I don’t want to lose you,” he whispered, his voice barely audible. “I’ve never felt this way about anyone before. And it’s funny because we just met, but we talked about things nobody knows.“

Tears slipped down your cheeks as you reached out, cupping his face in your hands. “I don’t want to lose you either. But we have to be realistic. We can’t be together… not like this.”

He closed his eyes, leaning into your touch. For a moment, you stayed like that, holding onto each other as if you could stop the inevitable from happening. But deep down, you both knew the truth.

With a heavy heart, you pulled away, grabbing your clothes and getting dressed in silence. Seungcheol didn’t stop you. He simply sat there, watching as you prepared to leave, his face a mask of heartbreak.

Before you left, you turned to him one last time. “Maybe one day things will be different. But for now… this is goodbye.”

His eyes were glossy, but he nodded, understanding that there was nothing more to say. "Goodbye, Y/N."

And with that, you left the room, your heart breaking with every step. As you walked down the hotel corridor, you realized that some love stories don’t have happy endings—not because they aren’t real, but because the world isn’t ready for them.

Seungcheol would always be a part of you, a memory tucked away in your heart. But your worlds were too different, the distance too great. And no matter how much you wished otherwise, some things were just not meant to be.

Seungcheol would just be a beautiful memory tucked away with he thought about lollapalooza 2024.