#I love my dungeon weekends | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

mostlysignssomeportents · 3 months ago

Text

“Disenshittify or Die”

youtube

I'm coming to BURNING MAN! On TUESDAY (Aug 27) at 1PM, I'm giving a talk called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE!" at PALENQUE NORTE (7&E). On WEDNESDAY (Aug 28) at NOON, I'm doing a "Talking Caterpillar" Q&A at LIMINAL LABS (830&C).

Last weekend, I traveled to Las Vegas for Defcon 32, where I had the immense privilege of giving a solo talk on Track 1, entitled "Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification":

https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=54861

This was a followup to last year's talk, "An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification," a talk that kicked off a lot of international interest in my analysis of platform decay ("enshittification"):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rimtaSgGz_4

The Defcon organizers have earned a restful week or two, and that means that the video of my talk hasn't yet been posted to Defcon's Youtube channel, so in the meantime, I thought I'd post a lightly edited version of my speech crib. If you're headed to Burning Man, you can hear me reprise this talk at Palenque Norte (7&E); I'm kicking off their lecture series on Tuesday, Aug 27 at 1PM.

What the fuck happened to the old, good internet?

I mean, sure, our bosses were a little surveillance-happy, and they were usually up for sharing their data with the NSA, and whenever there was a tossup between user security and growth, it was always YOLO time.

But Google Search used to work. Facebook used to show you posts from people you followed. Uber used to be cheaper than a taxi and pay the driver more than a cabbie made. Amazon used to sell products, not Shein-grade self-destructing dropshipped garbage from all-consonant brands. Apple used to defend your privacy, rather than spying on you with your no-modifications-allowed Iphone.

There was a time when you searching for an album on Spotify would get you that album – not a playlist of insipid AI-generated covers with the same name and art.

Microsoft used to sell you software – sure, it was buggy – but now they just let you access apps in the cloud, so they can watch how you use those apps and strip the features you use the most out of the basic tier and turn them into an upcharge.

What – and I cannot stress this enough – the fuck happened?!

I’m talking about enshittification.

Here’s what enshittification looks like from the outside: First, you see a company that’s being good to its end users. Google puts the best search results at the top; Facebook shows you a feed of posts from people and groups you followl; Uber charges small dollars for a cab; Amazon subsidizes goods and returns and shipping and puts the best match for your product search at the top of the page.

That’s stage one, being good to end users. But there’s another part of this stage, call it stage 1a). That’s figuring out how to lock in those users.

There’s so many ways to lock in users.

If you’re Facebook, the users do it for you. You joined Facebook because there were people there you wanted to hang out with, and other people joined Facebook to hang out with you.

That’s the old “network effects” in action, and with network effects come “the collective action problem." Because you love your friends, but goddamn are they a pain in the ass! You all agree that FB sucks, sure, but can you all agree on when it’s time to leave?

No way.

Can you agree on where to go next?

Hell no.

You’re there because that’s where the support group for your rare disease hangs out, and your bestie is there because that’s where they talk with the people in the country they moved away from, then there’s that friend who coordinates their kid’s little league car pools on FB, and the best dungeon master you know isn’t gonna leave FB because that’s where her customers are.

So you’re stuck, because even though FB use comes at a high cost – your privacy, your dignity and your sanity – that’s still less than the switching cost you’d have to bear if you left: namely, all those friends who have taken you hostage, and whom you are holding hostage

Now, sometimes companies lock you in with money, like Amazon getting you to prepay for a year’s shipping with Prime, or to buy your Audible books on a monthly subscription, which virtually guarantees that every shopping search will start on Amazon, after all, you’ve already paid for it.

Sometimes, they lock you in with DRM, like HP selling you a printer with four ink cartridges filled with fluid that retails for more than $10,000/gallon, and using DRM to stop you from refilling any of those ink carts or using a third-party cartridge. So when one cart runs dry, you have to refill it or throw away your investment in the remaining three cartridges and the printer itself.

Sometimes, it’s a grab bag:

You can’t run your Ios apps without Apple hardware;

you can’t run your Apple music, books and movies on anything except an Ios app;

your iPhone uses parts pairing – DRM handshakes between replacement parts and the main system – so you can’t use third-party parts to fix it; and

every OEM iPhone part has a microscopic Apple logo engraved on it, so Apple can demand that the US Customs and Border Service seize any shipment of refurb Iphone parts as trademark violations.

Think Different, amirite?

Getting you locked in completes phase one of the enshittification cycle and signals the start of phase two: making things worse for you to make things better for business customers.

For example, a platform might poison its search results, like Google selling more and more of its results pages to ads that are identified with lighter and lighter tinier and tinier type.

Or Amazon selling off search results and calling it an “ad” business. They make $38b/year on this scam. The first result for your search is, on average, 29% more expensive than the best match for your search. The first row is 25% more expensive than the best match. On average, the best match for your search is likely to be found seventeen places down on the results page.

Other platforms sell off your feed, like Facebook, which started off showing you the things you asked to see, but now the quantum of content from the people you follow has dwindled to a homeopathic residue, leaving a void that Facebook fills with things that people pay to show you: boosted posts from publishers you haven’t subscribed to, and, of course, ads.

Now at this point you might be thinking ‘sure, if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.'

Bullshit!

Bull.

Shit.

The people who buy those Google ads? They pay more every year for worse ad-targeting and more ad-fraud

Those publishers paying to nonconsensually cram their content into your Facebook feed? They have to do that because FB suppresses their ability to reach the people who actually subscribed to them

The Amazon sellers with the best match for your query have to outbid everyone else just to show up on the first page of results. It costs so much to sell on Amazon that between 45-51% of every dollar an independent seller brings in has to be kicked up to Don Bezos and the Amazon crime family. Those sellers don’t have the kind of margins that let them pay 51% They have to raise prices in order to avoid losing money on every sale.

"But wait!" I hear you say!

[Come on, say it!]

"But wait! Things on Amazon aren’t more expensive that things at Target, or Walmart, or at a mom and pop store, or direct from the manufacturer.

"How can sellers be raising prices on Amazon if the price at Amazon is the same as at is everywhere else?"

[Any guesses?!]

That’s right, they charge more everywhere. They have to. Amazon binds its sellers to a policy called “most favored nation status,” which says they can’t charge more on Amazon than they charge elsewhere, including direct from their own factory store.

So every seller that wants to sell on Amazon has to raise their prices everywhere else.

Now, these sellers are Amazon’s best customers. They’re paying for the product, and they’re still getting screwed.

Paying for the product doesn’t fill your vapid boss’s shriveled heart with so much joy that he decides to stop trying to think of ways to fuck you over.

Look at Apple. Remember when Apple offered every Ios user a one-click opt out for app-based surveillance? And 96% of users clicked that box?

(The other four percent were either drunk or Facebook employees or drunk Facebook employees.)

That cost Facebook at least ten billion dollars per year in lost surveillance revenue?

I mean, you love to see it.

But did you know that at the same time Apple started spying on Ios users in the same way that Facebook had been, for surveillance data to use to target users for its competing advertising product?

Your Iphone isn’t an ad-supported gimme. You paid a thousand fucking dollars for that distraction rectangle in your pocket, and you’re still the product. What’s more, Apple has rigged Ios so that you can’t mod the OS to block its spying.

If you’re not not paying for the product, you’re the product, and if you are paying for the product, you’re still the product.

Just ask the farmers who are expected to swap parts into their own busted half-million dollar, mission-critical tractors, but can’t actually use those parts until a technician charges them $200 to drive out to the farm and type a parts pairing unlock code into their console.

John Deere’s not giving away tractors. Give John Deere a half mil for a tractor and you will be the product.

Please, my brothers and sisters in Christ. Please! Stop saying ‘if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.’

OK, OK, so that’s phase two of enshittification.

Phase one: be good to users while locking them in.

Phase two: screw the users a little to you can good to business customers while locking them in.

Phase three: screw everybody and take all the value for yourself. Leave behind the absolute bare minimum of utility so that everyone stays locked into your pile of shit.

Enshittification: a tragedy in three acts.

That’s what enshittification looks like from the outside, but what’s going on inside the company? What is the pathological mechanism? What sci-fi entropy ray converts the excellent and useful service into a pile of shit?

That mechanism is called twiddling. Twiddling is when someone alters the back end of a service to change how its business operates, changing prices, costs, search ranking, recommendation criteria and other foundational aspects of the system.

Digital platforms are a twiddler’s utopia. A grocer would need an army of teenagers with pricing guns on rollerblades to reprice everything in the building when someone arrives who’s extra hungry.

Whereas the McDonald’s Investments portfolio company Plexure advertises that it can use surveillance data to predict when an app user has just gotten paid so the seller can tack an extra couple bucks onto the price of their breakfast sandwich.

And of course, as the prophet William Gibson warned us, ‘cyberspace is everting.' With digital shelf tags, grocers can change prices whenever they feel like, like the grocers in Norway, whose e-ink shelf tags change the prices 2,000 times per day.

Every Uber driver is offered a different wage for every job. If a driver has been picky lately, the job pays more. But if the driver has been desperate enough to grab every ride the app offers, the pay goes down, and down, and down.

The law professor Veena Dubal calls this ‘algorithmic wage discrimination.' It’s a prime example of twiddling.

Every youtuber knows what it’s like to be twiddled. You work for weeks or months, spend thousands of dollars to make a video, then the algorithm decides that no one – not your own subscribers, not searchers who type in the exact name of your video – will see it.

Why? Who knows? The algorithm’s rules are not public.

Because content moderation is the last redoubt of security through obscurit: they can’t tell you what the como algorithm is downranking because then you’d cheat.

Youtube is the kind of shitty boss who docks every paycheck for all the rules you’ve broken, but won’t tell you what those rules were, lest you figure out how to break those rules next time without your boss catching you.

Twiddling can also work in some users’ favor, of course. Sometimes platforms twiddle to make things better for end users or business customers.

For example, Emily Baker-White from Forbes revealed the existence of a back-end feature that Tiktok’s management can access they call the “heating tool.”

When a manager applies the heating toll to a performer’s account, that performer’s videos are thrust into the feeds of millions of users, without regard to whether the recommendation algorithm predicts they will enjoy that video.

Why would they do this? Well, here’s an analogy from my boyhood I used to go to this traveling fair that would come to Toronto at the end of every summer, the Canadian National Exhibition. If you’ve been to a fair like the Ex, you know that you can always spot some guy lugging around a comedically huge teddy bear.

Nominally, you win that teddy bear by throwing five balls in a peach-basket, but to a first approximation, no one has ever gotten five balls to stay in that peach-basket.

That guy “won” the teddy bear when a carny on the midway singled him out and said, "fella, I like your face. Tell you what I’m gonna do: You get just one ball in the basket and I’ll give you this keychain, and if you amass two keychains, I’ll let you trade them in for one of these galactic-scale teddy-bears."

That’s how the guy got his teddy bear, which he now has to drag up and down the midway for the rest of the day.

Why the hell did that carny give away the teddy bear? Because it turns the guy into a walking billboard for the midway games. If that dopey-looking Judas Goat can get five balls into a peach basket, then so can you.

Except you can’t.

Tiktok’s heating tool is a way to give away tactical giant teddy bears. When someone in the TikTok brain trust decides they need more sports bros on the platform, they pick one bro out at random and make him king for the day, heating the shit out of his account.

That guy gets a bazillion views and he starts running around on all the sports bro forums trumpeting his success: *I am the Louis Pasteur of sports bro influencers!"

The other sports bros pile in and start retooling to make content that conforms to the idiosyncratic Tiktok format. When they fail to get giant teddy bears of their own, they assume that it’s because they’re doing Tiktok wrong, because they don’t know about the heating tool.

But then comes the day when the TikTok Star Chamber decides they need to lure in more astrologers, so they take the heat off that one lucky sports bro, and start heating up some lucky astrologer.

Giant teddy bears are all over the place: those Uber drivers who were boasting to the NYT ten years ago about earning $50/hour? The Substackers who were rolling in dough? Joe Rogan and his hundred million dollar Spotify payout? Those people are all the proud owners of giant teddy bears, and they’re a steal.

Because every dollar they get from the platform turns into five dollars worth of free labor from suckers who think they just internetting wrong.

Giant teddy bears are just one way of twiddling. Platforms can play games with every part of their business logic, in highly automated ways, that allows them to quickly and efficiently siphon value from end users to business customers and back again, hiding the pea in a shell game conducted at machine speeds, until they’ve got everyone so turned around that they take all the value for themselves.

That’s the how: How the platforms do the trick where they are good to users, then lock users in, then maltreat users to be good to business customers, then lock in those business customers, then take all the value for themselves.

So now we know what is happening, and how it is happening, all that’s left is why it’s happening.

Now, on the one hand, the why is pretty obvious. The less value that end-users and business customers capture, the more value there is left to divide up among the shareholders and the executives.

That’s why, but it doesn’t tell you why now. Companies could have done this shit at any time in the past 20 years, but they didn’t. Or at least, the successful ones didn’t. The ones that turned themselves into piles of shit got treated like piles of shit. We avoided them and they died.

Remember Myspace? Yahoo Search? Livejournal? Sure, they’re still serving some kind of AI slop or programmatic ad junk if you hit those domains, but they’re gone.

And there’s the clue: It used to be that if you enshittified your product, bad things happened to your company. Now, there are no consequences for enshittification, so everyone’s doing it.

Let’s break that down: What stops a company from enshittifying?

There are four forces that discipline tech companies. The first one is, obviously, competition.

If your customers find it easy to leave, then you have to worry about them leaving

Many factors can contribute to how hard or easy it is to depart a platform, like the network effects that Facebook has going for it. But the most important factor is whether there is anywhere to go.

Back in 2012, Facebook bought Insta for a billion dollars. That may seem like chump-change in these days of eleven-digit Big Tech acquisitions, but that was a big sum in those innocent days, and it was an especially big sum to pay for Insta. The company only had 13 employees, and a mere 25 million registered users.

But what mattered to Zuckerberg wasn’t how many users Insta had, it was where those users came from.

[Does anyone know where those Insta users came from?]

That’s right, they left Facebook and joined Insta. They were sick of FB, even though they liked the people there, they hated creepy Zuck, they hated the platform, so they left and they didn’t come back.

So Zuck spent a cool billion to recapture them, A fact he put in writing in a midnight email to CFO David Ebersman, explaining that he was paying over the odds for Insta because his users hated him, and loved Insta. So even if they quit Facebook (the platform), they would still be captured Facebook (the company).

Now, on paper, Zuck’s Instagram acquisition is illegal, but normally, that would be hard to stop, because you’d have to prove that he bought Insta with the intention of curtailing competition.

But in this case, Zuck tripped over his own dick: he put it in writing.

But Obama’s DoJ and FTC just let that one slide, following the pro-monopoly policies of Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II, and setting an example that Trump would follow, greenlighting gigamergers like the catastrophic, incestuous Warner-Discovery marriage.

Indeed, for 40 years, starting with Carter, and accelerating through Reagan, the US has encouraged monopoly formation, as an official policy, on the grounds that monopolies are “efficient.”

If everyone is using Google Search, that’s something we should celebrate. It means they’ve got the very best search and wouldn’t it be perverse to spend public funds to punish them for making the best product?

But as we all know, Google didn’t maintain search dominance by being best. They did it by paying bribes. More than 20 billion per year to Apple alone to be the default Ios search, plus billions more to Samsung, Mozilla, and anyone else making a product or service with a search-box on it, ensuring that you never stumble on a search engine that’s better than theirs.

Which, in turn, ensured that no one smart invested big in rival search engines, even if they were visibly, obviously superior. Why bother making something better if Google’s buying up all the market oxygen before it can kindle your product to life?

Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon – they’re not “making things” companies, they’re “buying things” companies, taking advantage of official tolerance for anticompetitive acquisitions, predatory pricing, market distorting exclusivity deals and other acts specifically prohibited by existing antitrust law.

Their goal is to become too big to fail, because that makes them too big to jail, and that means they can be too big to care.

Which is why Google Search is a pile of shit and everything on Amazon is dropshipped garbage that instantly disintegrates in a cloud of offgassed volatile organic compounds when you open the box.

Once companies no longer fear losing your business to a competitor, it’s much easier for them to treat you badly, because what’re you gonna do?

Remember Lily Tomlin as Ernestine the AT&T operator in those old SNL sketches? “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.”

Competition is the first force that serves to discipline companies and the enshittificatory impulses of their leadership, and we just stopped enforcing competition law.

It takes a special kind of smooth-brained asshole – that is, an establishment economist – to insist that the collapse of every industry from eyeglasses to vitamin C into a cartel of five or fewer companies has nothing to do with policies that officially encouraged monopolization.

It’s like we used to put down rat poison and we didn’t have a rat problem. Then these dickheads convinced us that rats were good for us and we stopped putting down rat poison, and now rats are gnawing our faces off and they’re all running around saying, "Who’s to say where all these rats came from? Maybe it was that we stopped putting down poison, but maybe it’s just the Time of the Rats. The Great Forces of History bearing down on this moment to multiply rats beyond all measure!"

Antitrust didn’t slip down that staircase and fall spine-first on that stiletto: they stabbed it in the back and then they pushed it.

And when they killed antitrust, they also killed regulation, the second force that disciplines companies. Regulation is possible, but only when the regulator is more powerful than the regulated entities. When a company is bigger than the government, it gets damned hard to credibly threaten to punish that company, no matter what its sins.

That’s what protected IBM for all those years when it had its boot on the throat of the American tech sector. Do you know, the DOJ fought to break up IBM in the courts from 1970-1982, and that every year, for 12 consecutive years, IBM spent more on lawyers to fight the USG than the DOJ Antitrust Division spent on all the lawyers fighting every antitrust case in the entire USA?

IBM outspent Uncle Sam for 12 years. People called it “Antitrust’s Vietnam.” All that money paid off, because by 1982, the president was Ronald Reagan, a man whose official policy was that monopolies were “efficient." So he dropped the case, and Big Blue wriggled off the hook.

It’s hard to regulate a monopolist, and it’s hard to regulate a cartel. When a sector is composed of hundreds of competing companies, they compete. They genuinely fight with one another, trying to poach each others’ customers and workers. They are at each others’ throats.

It’s hard enough for a couple hundred executives to agree on anything. But when they’re legitimately competing with one another, really obsessing about how to eat each others’ lunches, they can’t agree on anything.

The instant one of them goes to their regulator with some bullshit story, about how it’s impossible to have a decent search engine without fine-grained commercial surveillance; or how it’s impossible to have a secure and easy to use mobile device without a total veto over which software can run on it; or how it’s impossible to administer an ISP’s network unless you can slow down connections to servers whose owners aren’t paying bribes for “premium carriage"; there’s some *other company saying, “That’s bullshit”

“We’ve managed it! Here’s our server logs, our quarterly financials and our customer testimonials to prove it.”

100 companies are a rabble, they're a mob. They can’t agree on a lobbying position. They’re too busy eating each others’ lunch to agree on how to cater a meeting to discuss it.

But let those hundred companies merge to monopoly, absorb one another in an incestuous orgy, turn into five giant companies, so inbred they’ve got a corporate Habsburg jaw, and they become a cartel.

It’s easy for a cartel to agree on what bullshit they’re all going to feed their regulator, and to mobilize some of the excess billions they’ve reaped through consolidation, which freed them from “wasteful competition," sp they can capture their regulators completely.

You know, Congress used to pass federal consumer privacy laws? Not anymore.

The last time Congress managed to pass a federal consumer privacy law was in 1988: The Video Privacy Protection Act. That’s a law that bans video-store clerks from telling newspapers what VHS cassettes you take home. In other words, it regulates three things that have effectively ceased to exist.

The threat of having your video rental history out there in the public eye was not the last or most urgent threat the American public faced, and yet, Congress is deadlocked on passing a privacy law.

Tech companies’ regulatory capture involves a risible and transparent gambit, that is so stupid, it’s an insult to all the good hardworking risible transparent ruses out there.

Namely, they claim that when they violate your consumer, privacy or labor rights, It’s not a crime, because they do it with an app.

Algorithmic wage discrimination isn’t illegal wage theft: we do it with an app.

Spying on you from asshole to appetite isn’t a privacy violation: we do it with an app.

And Amazon’s scam search tool that tricks you into paying 29% more than the best match for your query? Not a ripoff. We do it with an app.

Once we killed competition – stopped putting down rat poison – we got cartels – the rats ate our faces. And the cartels captured their regulators – the rats bought out the poison factory and shut it down.

So companies aren’t constrained by competition or regulation.

But you know what? This is tech, and tech is different.IIt’s different because it’s flexible. Because our computers are Turing-complete universal von Neumann machines. That means that any enshittificatory alteration to a program can be disenshittified with another program.

Every time HP jacks up the price of ink , they invite a competitor to market a refill kit or a compatible cartridge.

When Tesla installs code that says you have to pay an extra monthly fee to use your whole battery, they invite a modder to start selling a kit to jailbreak that battery and charge it all the way up.

Lemme take you through a little example of how that works: Imagine this is a product design meeting for our company’s website, and the guy leading the meeting says “Dudes, you know how our KPI is topline ad-revenue? Well, I’ve calculated that if we make the ads just 20% more invasive and obnoxious, we’ll boost ad rev by 2%”

This is a good pitch. Hit that KPI and everyone gets a fat bonus. We can all take our families on a luxury ski vacation in Switzerland.

But here’s the thing: someone’s gonna stick their arm up – someone who doesn’t give a shit about user well-being, and that person is gonna say, “I love how you think, Elon. But has it occurred to you that if we make the ads 20% more obnoxious, then 40% of our users will go to a search engine and type 'How do I block ads?'"

I mean, what a nightmare! Because once a user does that, the revenue from that user doesn’t rise to 102%. It doesn’t stay at 100% It falls to zero, forever.

[Any guesses why?]

Because no user ever went back to the search engine and typed, 'How do I start seeing ads again?'

Once the user jailbreaks their phone or discovers third party ink, or develops a relationship with an independent Tesla mechanic who’ll unlock all the DLC in their car, that user is gone, forever.

Interoperability – that latent property bequeathed to us courtesy of Herrs Turing and Von Neumann and their infinitely flexible, universal machines – that is a serious check on enshittification.

The fact that Congress hasn’t passed a privacy law since 1988 Is countered, at least in part, by the fact that the majority of web users are now running ad-blockers, which are also tracker-blockers.

But no one’s ever installed a tracker-blocker for an app. Because reverse engineering an app puts in you jeopardy of criminal and civil prosecution under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, with penalties of a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine for a first offense.

And violating its terms of service puts you in jeopardy under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, which is the law that Ronald Reagan signed in a panic after watching Wargames (seriously!).

Helping other users violate the terms of service can get you hit with a lawsuit for tortious interference with contract. And then there’s trademark, copyright and patent.

All that nonsense we call “IP,” but which Jay Freeman of Cydia calls “Felony Contempt of Business Model."

So if we’re still at that product planning meeting and now it’s time to talk about our app, the guy leading the meeting says, “OK, so we’ll make the ads in the app 20% more obnoxious to pull a 2% increase in topline ad rev?”

And that person who objected to making the website 20% worse? Their hand goes back up. Only this time they say “Why don’t we make the ads 100% more invasive and get a 10% increase in ad rev?"

Because it doesn't matter if a user goes to a search engine and types, “How do I block ads in an app." The answer is: you can't. So YOLO, enshittify away.

“IP” is just a euphemism for “any law that lets me reach outside my company’s walls to exert coercive control over my critics, competitors and customers,” and “app” is just a euphemism for “A web page skinned with the right IP so that protecting your privacy while you use it is a felony.”

Interop used to keep companies from enshittifying. If a company made its client suck, someone would roll out an alternative client, if they ripped a feature out and wanted to sell it back to you as a monthly subscription, someone would make a compatible plugin that restored it for a one-time fee, or for free.

To help people flee Myspace, FB gave them bots that you’d load with your login credentials. It would scrape your waiting Myspace messages and put ‘em in your FB inbox, and login to Myspace and paste your replies into your Myspace outbox. So you didn’t have to choose between the people you loved on Myspace, and Facebook, which launched with a promise never to spy on you. Remember that?!

Thanks to the metastasis of IP, all that is off the table today. Apple owes its very existence to iWork Suite, whose Pages, Numbers and Keynote are file-compatible with Microsoft’s Word, Excel and Powerpoint. But make an IOS runtime that’ll play back the files you bought from Apple’s stores on other platforms, and they’ll nuke you til you glow.

FB wouldn’t have had a hope of breaking Myspace’s grip on social media without that scrape, but scrape FB today in support of an alternative client and their lawyers will bomb you til the rubble bounces.

Google scraped every website in the world to create its search index. Try and scrape Google and they’ll have your head on a pike.

When they did it, it was progress. When you do it to them, that’s piracy. Every pirate wants to be an admiral.

Because this handful of companies has so thoroughly captured their regulators, they can wield the power of the state against you when you try to break their grip on power, even as their own flagrant violations of our rights go unpunished. Because they do them with an app.

Tech lost its fear of competitin it neutralized the threat from regulators, and then put them in harness to attack new startups that might do unto them as they did unto the companies that came before them.

But even so, there was a force that kept our bosses in check That force was us. Tech workers.

Tech workers have historically been in short supply, which gave us power, and our bosses knew it.

To get us to work crazy hours, they came up with a trick. They appealed to our love of technology, and told us that we were heroes of a digital revolution, who would “organize the world’s information and make it useful,” who would “bring the world closer together.”

They brought in expert set-dressers to turn our workplaces into whimsical campuses with free laundry, gourmet cafeterias, massages, and kombucha, and a surgeon on hand to freeze our eggs so that we could work through our fertile years.

They convinced us that we were being pampered, rather than being worked like government mules.

This trick has a name. Fobazi Ettarh, the librarian-theorist, calls it “vocational awe, and Elon Musk calls it being “extremely hardcore.”

This worked very well. Boy did we put in some long-ass hours!

But for our bosses, this trick failed badly. Because if you miss your mother’s funeral and to hit a deadline, and then your boss orders you to enshittify that product, you are gonna experience a profound moral injury, which you are absolutely gonna make your boss share.

Because what are they gonna do? Fire you? They can’t hire someone else to do your job, and you can get a job that’s even better at the shop across the street.

So workers held the line when competition, regulation and interop failed.

But eventually, supply caught up with demand. Tech laid off 260,000 of us last year, and another 100,000 in the first half of this year.

You can’t tell your bosses to go fuck themselves, because they’ll fire your ass and give your job to someone who’ll be only too happy to enshittify that product you built.

That’s why this is all happening right now. Our bosses aren’t different. They didn’t catch a mind-virus that turned them into greedy assholes who don’t care about our users’ wellbeing or the quality of our products.

As far as our bosses have always been concerned, the point of the business was to charge the most, and deliver the least, while sharing as little as possible with suppliers, workers, users and customers. They’re not running charities.

Since day one, our bosses have shown up for work and yanked as hard as they can on the big ENSHITTIFICATION lever behind their desks, only that lever didn’t move much. It was all gummed up by competition, regulation, interop and workers.

As those sources of friction melted away, the enshittification lever started moving very freely.

Which sucks, I know. But think about this for a sec: our bosses, despite being wildly imperfect vessels capable of rationalizing endless greed and cheating, nevertheless oversaw a series of actually great products and services.

Not because they used to be better people, but because they used to be subjected to discipline.

So it follows that if we want to end the enshittocene, dismantle the enshitternet, and build a new, good internet that our bosses can’t wreck, we need to make sure that these constraints are durably installed on that internet, wound around its very roots and nerves. And we have to stand guard over it so that it can’t be dismantled again.

A new, good internet is one that has the positive aspects of the old, good internet: an ethic of technological self-determination, where users of technology (and hackers, tinkerers, startups and others serving as their proxies) can reconfigure and mod the technology they use, so that it does what they need it to do, and so that it can’t be used against them.

But the new, good internet will fix the defects of the old, good internet, the part that made it hard to use for anyone who wasn’t us. And hell yeah we can do that. Tech bosses swear that it’s impossible, that you can’t have a conversation friend without sharing it with Zuck; or search the web without letting Google scrape you down to the viscera; or have a phone that works reliably without giving Apple a veto over the software you install.

They claim that it’s a nonsense to even ponder this kind of thing. It’s like making water that’s not wet. But that’s bullshit. We can have nice things. We can build for the people we love, and give them a place that’s worth of their time and attention.

To do that, we have to install constraints.

The first constraint, remember, is competition. We’re living through a epochal shift in competition policy. After 40 years with antitrust enforcement in an induced coma, a wave of antitrust vigor has swept through governments all over the world. Regulators are stepping in to ban monopolistic practices, open up walled gardens, block anticompetitive mergers, and even unwind corrupt mergers that were undertaken on false pretenses.

Normally this is the place in the speech where I’d list out all the amazing things that have happened over the past four years. The enforcement actions that blocked companies from becoming too big to care, and that scared companies away from even trying.

Like Wiz, which just noped out of the largest acquisition offer in history, turning down Google’s $23b cashout, and deciding to, you know, just be a fucking business that makes money by producing a product that people want and selling it at a competitive price.

Normally, I’d be listing out FTC rulemakings that banned noncompetes nationwid. Or the new merger guidelines the FTC and DOJ cooked up, which – among other things – establish that the agencies should be considering whether a merger will negatively impact privacy.

I had a whole section of this stuff in my notes, a real victory lap, but I deleted it all this week.

[Can anyone guess why?]

That’s right! This week, Judge Amit Mehta, ruling for the DC Circuit of these United States of America, In the docket 20-3010 a case known as United States v. Google LLC, found that “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly," and ordered Google and the DOJ to propose a schedule for a remedy, like breaking the company up.

So yeah, that was pretty fucking epic.

Now, this antitrust stuff is pretty esoteric, and I won’t gatekeep you or shame you if you wanna keep a little distance on this subject. Nearly everyone is an antitrust normie, and that's OK. But if you’re a normie, you’re probably only catching little bits and pieces of the narrative, and let me tell you, the monopolists know it and they are flooding the zone.

The Wall Street Journal has published over 100 editorials condemning FTC Chair Lina Khan, saying she’s an ineffectual do-nothing, wasting public funds chasing doomed, quixotic adventures against poor, innocent businesses accomplishing nothing

[Does anyone out there know who owns the Wall Street Journal?]

That’s right, it’s Rupert Murdoch. Do you really think Rupert Murdoch pays his editorial board to write one hundred editorials about someone who’s not getting anything done?

The reality is that in the USA, in the UK, in the EU, in Australia, in Canada, in Japan, in South Korea, even in China, we are seeing more antitrust action over the past four years than over the preceding forty years.

Remember, competition law is actually pretty robust. The problem isn’t the law, It’s the enforcement priorities. Reagan put antitrust in mothballs 40 years ago, but that elegant weapon from a more civilized age is now back in the hands of people who know how to use it, and they’re swinging for the fences.

Next up: regulation.

As the seemingly inescapable power of the tech giants is revealed for the sham it always was, governments and regulators are finally gonna kill the “one weird trick” of violating the law, and saying “It doesn’t count, we did it with an app.”

Like in the EU, they’re rolling out the Digital Markets Act this year. That’s a law requiring dominant platforms to stand up APIs so that third parties can offer interoperable services.

So a co-op, a nonprofit, a hobbyist, a startup, or a local government agency wil eventuallyl be able to offer, say, a social media server that can interconnect with one of the dominant social media silos, and users who switch to that new platform will be able to continue to exchange messages with the users they follow and groups they belong to, so the switching costs will fall to damned near zero.

That’s a very cool rule, but what’s even cooler is how it’s gonna be enforced. Previous EU tech rules were “regulations” as in the GDPR – the General Data Privacy Regulation. EU regs need to be “transposed” into laws in each of the 27 EU member states, so they become national laws that get enforced by national courts.

For Big Tech, that means all previous tech regulations are enforced in Ireland, because Ireland is a tax haven, and all the tech companies fly Irish flags of convenience.

Here’s the thing: every tax haven is also a crime haven. After all, if Google can pretend it’s Irish this week, it can pretend to be Cypriot, or Maltese, or Luxembougeious next week. So Ireland has to keep these footloose criminal enterprises happy, or they’ll up sticks and go somewhere else.

This is why the GDPR is such a goddamned joke in practice. Big tech wipes its ass with the GDPR, and the only way to punish them starts with Ireland’s privacy commissioner, who barely bothers to get out of bed. This is an agency that spends most of its time watching cartoons on TV in its pajamas and eating breakfast cereal. So all of the big GDPR cases go to Ireland and they die there.

This is hardly a secret. The European Commission knows it’s going on. So with the DMA, the Commission has changed things up: The DMA is an “Act,” not a “Regulation.” Meaning it gets enforced in the EU’s federal courts, bypassing the national courts in crime-havens like Ireland.

In other words, the “we violate privacy law, but we do it with an app” gambit that worked on Ireland’s toothless privacy watchdog is now a dead letter, because EU federal judges have no reason to swallow that obvious bullshit.

Here in the US, the dam is breaking on federal consumer privacy law – at last!

Remember, our last privacy law was passed in 1988 to protect the sanctity of VHS rental history. It's been a minute.

And the thing is, there's a lot of people who are angry about stuff that has some nexus with America's piss-poor privacy landscape. Worried that Facebook turned grampy into a Qanon? That Insta made your teen anorexic? That TikTok is brainwashing millennials into quoting Osama Bin Laden? Or that cops are rolling up the identities of everyone at a Black Lives Matter protest or the Jan 6 riots by getting location data from Google? Or that Red State Attorneys General are tracking teen girls to out-of-state abortion clinics? Or that Black people are being discriminated against by online lending or hiring platforms? Or that someone is making AI deepfake porn of you?

A federal privacy law with a private right of action – which means that individuals can sue companies that violate their privacy – would go a long way to rectifying all of these problems

There's a pretty big coalition for that kind of privacy law! Which is why we have seen a procession of imperfect (but steadily improving) privacy laws working their way through Congress.

If you sign up for EFF’s mailing list at eff.org we’ll send you an email when these come up, so you can call your Congressjerk or Senator and talk to them about it. Or better yet, make an appointment to drop by their offices when they’re in their districts, and explain to them that you’re not just a registered voter from their district, you’re the kind of elite tech person who goes to Defcon, and then explain the bill to them. That stuff makes a difference.

What about self-help? How are we doing on making interoperability legal again, so hackers can just fix shit without waiting for Congress or a federal agency to act?

All the action here these day is in the state Right to Repair fight. We’re getting state R2R bills, like the one that passed this year in Oregon that bans parts pairing, where DRM is used to keep a device from using a new part until it gets an authorized technician’s unlock code.

These bills are pushed by a fantastic group of organizations called the Repair Coalition, at Repair.org, and they’ll email you when one of these laws is going through your statehouse, so you can meet with your state reps and explain to the JV squad the same thing you told your federal reps.

Repair.org’s prime mover is Ifixit, who are genuine heroes of the repair revolution, and Ifixit’s founder, Kyle Wiens, is here at the con. When you see him, you can shake his hand and tell him thanks, and that’ll be even better if you tell him that you’ve signed up to get alerts at repair.org!

Now, on to the final way that we reverse enhittification and build that new, good internet: you, the tech labor force.

For years, your bosses tricked you into thinking you were founders in waiting, temporarily embarrassed entrepreneurs who were only momentarily drawing a salary.

You certainly weren’t workers. Your power came from your intrinsic virtue, not like those lazy slobs in unions who have to get their power through that kumbaya solidarity nonsense.

It was a trick. You were scammed. The power you had came from scarcity, and so when the scarcity ended, when the industry started ringing up six-figure annual layoffs, your power went away with it.

The only durable source of power for tech workers is as workers, in a union.

Think about Amazon. Warehouse workers have to piss in bottles and have the highest rate of on-the-job maimings of any competing business. Whereas Amazon coders get to show up for work with facial piercings, green mohawks, and black t-shirts that say things their bosses don’t understand. They can piss whenever they want!

That’s not because Jeff Bezos or Andy Jassy loves you guys. It’s because they’re scared you’ll quit and they don’t know how to replace you.

Time for the second obligatory William Gibson quote: “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” You know who’s living in the future?. Those Amazon blue-collar workers. They are the bleeding edge.

Drivers whose eyeballs are monitored by AI cameras that do digital phrenology on their faces to figure out whether to dock their pay, warehouse workers whose bodies are ruined in just months.

As tech bosses beef up that reserve army of unemployed, skilled tech workers, then those tech workers – you all – will arrive at the same future as them.

Look, I know that you’ve spent your careers explaining in words so small your boss could understand them that you refuse to enshittify the company’s products, and I thank you for your service.

But if you want to go on fighting for the user, you need power that’s more durable than scarcity. You need a union. Wanna learn how? Check out the Tech Workers Coalition and Tech Solidarity, and get organized.

Enshittification didn’t arise because our bosses changed. They were always that guy.

They were always yankin’ on that enshittification lever in the C-suite.

What changed was the environment, everything that kept that switch from moving.

And that’s good news, in a bankshot way, because it means we can make good services out of imperfect people. As a wildly imperfect person myself, I find this heartening.

The new good internet is in our grasp: an internet that has the technological self-determination of the old, good internet, and the greased-skids simplicity of Web 2.0 that let all our normie friends get in on the fun.

Tech bosses want you to think that good UX and enshittification can’t ever be separated. That’s such a self-serving proposition you can spot it from orbit. We know it, 'cause we built the old good internet, and we’ve been fighting a rear-guard action to preserve it for the past two decades.

It’s time to stop playing defense. It's time to go on the offensive. To restore competition, regulation, interop and tech worker power so that we can create the new, good internet we’ll need to fight fascism, the climate emergency, and genocide.

To build a digital nervous system for a 21st century in which our children can thrive and prosper.

Community voting for SXSW is live! If you wanna hear RIDA QADRI and me talk about how GIG WORKERS can DISENSHITTIFY their jobs with INTEROPERABILITY, VOTE FOR THIS ONE!

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/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess

Image: https://twitter.com/igama/status/1822347578094043435/ (cropped)

@[email protected] (cropped)

https://mamot.fr/@[email protected]/112963252835869648

CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.pt

#pluralistic #defcon #defcon 32 #hackers #enshittification #speeches #transcripts #disenshittify or die #Youtube

905 notes · View notes

traveler-at-heart · 4 months ago

Text

Movie Afternoon

Nerd!Natasha has been on my mind so much lately and this post was just so perfect I had to be horny on main, so there's that.

Warnings: Smut, G!P Natasha

The weekend was finally here. Exams had been a drag all week and as much as you loved the school paper, there was only so much reporting one could do about the new production of Wizard of Oz.

As usual, your brother’s friends were throwing a party and you were invited, but going to your girlfriend’s house for a movie marathon was the best plan.

You knocked on the Romanoff residence, waiting for Melina or Alexei to open up. Instead, Natasha herself was at the door, wearing grey sweatpants and a hoodie.

“Hi” she said, smiling as soon as she saw you.

“Hi, love” you stood up on your toes to peck her lips. “Where’s your fam? You never open the door”

“They went to get some groceries. I think mom’s making lasagna toni…” she explained, mumbling against your lips when you leaned forward again, this time your tongue asking for permission to enter.

Natasha let you deepen the kiss with a sigh, her hands holding on to your waist for dear life.

“Can we… go to my room?”

“For a movie, or something more?” you said, kissing down her neck and biting the skin.

“Mo-vie. I’m sorry, I’d love to, but they’ll be back any minute”

“That’s ok, baby” you said against her ear, pulling apart. You were a little evil, always testing how much you could tease Natasha. Shy, bashful and beautiful Natasha.

You reached for her hand and led her up the stairs, knowing the way to her room.

“What do you want to watch?” she said, as you laid in her bed and she got her computer.

“Anything you want”

“What about the new Dungeons and Dragons movie?”

“Sure” you agreed, remembering Natasha had missed it on the theater because she was ill.

“Ok, here we go” she placed the computer at your feet, and you made yourself at home in her arms, leaning on her chest.

She smelled so nice, as usual. As the movie progressed, you ran your hands up and down her abdomen, in what you thought was a soothing manner.

That is, until you heard Natasha stiffle what sounded like a groan.

“What’s wrong, baby?” you straightened up, looking at her. “Sorry, did your arm fall asleep,? I’ll move”

“No, it’s not that” she said, her eyes on the ceiling.

“Well, then, what is…” your eyes scanned the rest of her body, and you finally saw the tent at her pants. “Oh, baby”

“It’s ok, it’ll come down in a minute” she said, more to herself than to you. Your girlfriend was about to grab a pillow to cover her erection when you intercepted her hand.

“Let me…”

“Y/N…”

“What? I caused this. I should be the one to fix it… don’t you think?”

“If they come back and see us” she was trying to come up with excuses not to do it and you smiled, straddling her lap.

“Honey, your mom already knows. Didn’t you catch the look she gave us the other day when we were late from the library?”

Of course, you had left the library on time, but an intense make out session led to you sucking Natasha’s dick on the school parking lot. What a shame your car was too small to fit you both on the backseat.

“You don’t have to”

“Of course I don’t have to. I want to, Natasha”

Those words seemed to have a magic effect on her, erasing any other objections. Her hands came to hold your waist as you kissed her passionately, grinding against her hard dick.

You mentally congratulated yourself for wearing a skirt, that would give her easy access to your pussy.

“Where are the condoms?” you said against her lips and her hand reached for the nighstand drawer. “Let me”

You leaned forward, still straddling her. The position made your chest go up to her face and Natasha wasn’t able to resist the temptation of squeezing your breasts, hardened nipples showing through the fabric of your shirt.

“Like what you see?” you teased and the girl nodded dumbly. “Maybe you can cum on them later”

The words made her jolt her hips forward, her dick crashing against your clothed pussy. You couldn’t resist the moan that left your lips and you moved down, fighting with the waistband of her pants.

“Here” she lifted her hips and you were able to take off her pants and briefs, her cock springing free in all its 9 inch glory.

“So big” you muttered, your mouth watering. You were supposed to only put on the condom… but who could resist? Your tongue licked her entire shaft, starting from the balls all the way to the tip. Natasha let out a loud moan, buckling her hips in the air. You let her move, while your mouth covered her tip and inch by inch, you took all of her.

“Baby, you feel so fucking good…” she said, her mind a haze of pleasure and lust. The curse word only fueled the fire in your belly, knowing Natasha never said anything like that. You took as much as you could, until it hit the back of your throat, and then you began to move, up and down, strings of saliva running down the corners of your mouth.

Natasha fisted the comforter of her bed, and once her hips began an erratic rythm you knew she was close.

To her dismay, you didn’t let her finish, her cock leaving your mouth, still standing painfully hard.

“What… why...” she practically whined, desperate for release.

“Wouldn’t be fair if you had all the fun, now would it, baby?” you teased, and your hands placing the condom distracted her enough. Feeling your touch was the only way to relieve the coil in her stomach.

You went back up, allowing her to taste herself on your lips. She moaned against your tongue, and knowing she was distracted by the kiss, you grabbed her dick and lined it up with your pussy.

You were sure the neighbours had heard her moan as soon as she entered you, breaking the kiss apart.

“Y/N” she begged, and you weren’t sure if she wanted you to move or hold still.

“Talk to me, baby”

“Can you… move? Yes, just like that”

You began grinding your hips, up and down, feeling her cock almost hit your cervix. You really ought to get on birth control, imagining how amazing it would feel to have Natasha fill you with her cum.

“What did you…?”

Oh. You were probably thinking out loud.

“I want you… to fill my pussy with all your cum, Natasha” you said between breaths, bouncing harder on her dick. “God, your cock is so fucking big, it ruined me, no one can fuck me as good as you, baby”

You moved your hips faster and Natasha tried to match your pace, but you could tell she was close.

Two things happened at once.

You heard her family pull up the driveway and the next minute, Natasha was coming hard. You had to cover her mouth to stiffle her moan.

“Did you…?” she asked after a second, her breath still laboured.

“It’s ok, baby” you said, kissing her softly. “Come on, clean up, they’ll come check on us any minute now”

The redhead nodded, getting up to discard the condom and put on her boxers and pants. For your part, you fixed your hair as best as you could, as well as your shirt, that had ridden up all the way to your midsection.

Sure enough, Natasha’s mother came up minutes later. By that time, you were both leaning against the headboard, pretending to watch the movie.

“Y/N, how were exams this week?”

“All good, Mrs. Romanoff. Just have to practice my Spanish a bit” you smiled, sounding as composed as you could.

The woman nodded and turned to her daughter.

Natasha was… well, she looked flustered, to be honest. Melina said something in Russian, making her daughter blush madly.

“You’re welcome to stay over for dinner” Melina said, this time to you and you nodded.

“Thank you”

As soon as the door was shut, you turned to Natasha.

“You were right. She knows” Natasha mumbled, turning red.

You let out a laugh at that.

“Told ya”

“You’re gonna kill me one day”

“Preferably while we’re fucking hard” you said, unable to help yourself around your girlfriend. Without caring about her family downstairs, you began to kiss her once again, and you felt strong hands holding your waist and traveling down to squeeze your ass.

“Hey, Natasha… ah!!” Yelena walked in, covering her eyes and exiting dramatically.

“Knock next time!” Natasha yelled after her. “She’s so gonna snitch on me”

“My house is free tomorrow” you said against her ear and she shivered. “So, drink lots of fluids and come ready. We’re leveling the score, baby”

#natasha romanoff x reader #natasha romanoff x y/n #natasha romanoff x you

1K notes · View notes

toxycodone · 2 months ago

Text

Monster Fucker's Journal - (Laios Touden x Reader) Masterlist

desc. Laios Touden never expected to meet another person who shared his passion for monsters and yet, somehow, you two have managed to find each other. Traversing the dungeon and learning more about its inhabitants has been a dream for the two of you. You and Laios have filled out his journal with tons of firsthand information on monsters, from detailed notes on their anatomy to the various locations they can be found.

However, you notice he's lacking on one aspect in particular...breeding habits. As much as he's dying to know this information, Laios isn't going to be able to collect this information on his lonesome. I mean, he can't take notes while getting fucked...

So as his generous and equally monster loving party member, you offer to help.

author's note. happy october everyone! I am getting back on my grind so. here is a fun little project. I'm hoping to post chapters every weekend <3 This fic will follow the canon timeline from the anime and basically just follow you getting fucked by monsters and laios watching + recording + examining your body afterwards. yay!!!

First Chapter drops Sunday, October 13th!

Introduction

Chapter One: Slime (Oviposition)

Chapter Two: Orc (Gangbang)

Chapter Three: Mermaid + Merman (Double Penetration)

Chapter Four: Tentacles (Sex Pollen)

Chapter Five: Minotaur (Size Difference/Milking)

~Bonus Chapters (depending on if this fic reaches note goals or if I feel like it lol)~

Werewolf/Dire Wolf (Knotting)

Red Dragon!Falin (Extreme Size Difference)

Dryad (Group Sex + Cunnilingus)

Shapeshifter (Group Sex + Selfcest)

...and more by request!

#laios touden #laios touden x reader #dungeon meshi x reader #dungeon meshi #monster fucker #kinktober #delicious in dungeon

262 notes · View notes

starlight-sev · 10 months ago

Text

Joy Looks Good on You (Snape x Artist!Reader)

Request: Snape with an artist reader- she makes gorgeous paintings, teaches an art class at Hogwarts (Bob Ross style, for reference). Doesn't have many students, but when he comes into her classroom its such a calming atmosphere. Maybe a short drabble about how he falls in love with her and her skill with paintings?

Requested by: anon

Warnings: none

A/N: this is more platonic than I had initially intended it to be, but I hope you enjoy it nonetheless!

Oh! Gender neutral reader as I always try my best to write 💕

Hogwarts was home to many secrets, one of them being that the school offered painting classes as an elective for those in third year or higher.

Even you were shocked when you first heard about the job posting. You always figured art would be just a hobby of yours. When it came to jobs in the wizarding world, anything to do with art and painting was quite rare to find.

So when you were finally offered the job for art teacher at Hogwarts, to say you were overjoyed would have been an understatement. You never thought you’d be able to turn your love of painting into your career.

Dumbledore had placed you in the North Tower, just below Professor Trelawney’s Divination classroom. Compared to her room, yours was rather small: you only had to walk ten steps and you’d already be at the other side of the room. A handful of round tables with matching wooden chairs had been crammed into the tiny space. There was a small desk nestled in the corner for you to work, along with a shelf against the wall to store your paints and supplies.

Your favourite feature about the room, and perhaps one of its only redeeming qualities, was the large window in the middle of the wall. It was rounded at the top, with an ornate stained glass inlay that covered almost half the window. It was the source of your inspiration on sunny days.

It certainly wasn’t the nicest classroom, and sometimes a theory crossed your mind that your classroom had once been a generously-sized storage closet, but anything was better than being down in the dungeons of the castle.

You glanced up from your own painting to quickly sweep your eyes over the paintings your students were finishing up. You never had more than ten students a year, painting certainly wasn’t a common interest for wizards (much to your disappointment), but it didn’t matter. It gave you the opportunity to grow closer to your students, to get to know everyone’s individual art style. It made you all the more proud when you were able to see how much they progressed over the course of the year.

“Professor?”

You glanced over to see Luna Lovegood, one of your students with the biggest imaginations, waving politely to catch your attention.

“Yes?” You asked softly.

“We won’t have time to finish our paintings this class. I know we’re not supposed to, but since it’s Friday, could we leave our supplies out? We’ll be back first thing on Monday.”

A few other students murmured their agreement. You smiled apologetically, silently cursing that you had given them an assignment far bigger than they had time to complete.

“Of course. That’s fine.” You dismissed everyone with a wave of your hand. “Go on. Enjoy the weekend. And don’t worry about handing in your still life sketches this week, you’ve got enough on your hands with the landscape painting I assigned.”

A handful of cheers erupted among the students, and you smiled as each one nodded and murmured their thanks before leaving.

You stood up from your desk, walking across the room to collect everyone’s paintbrushes one by one.

“Letting your students go without cleaning up after themselves?” A deep voice murmured softly from the doorway. “I’m surprised Y/N, I thought you were more disciplined than that.”

It never failed to startle you, how Severus had this uncanny ability to sneak up silently on you. Usually you’d be able to hear students’ footsteps echoing as they made their way up the stairs to your classroom, but Severus seemed to be able to glide noiselessly around the castle like a ghost.

You set your paintbrushes in the small sink that rested in the corner of your room, smiling in acknowledgement and beckoning the professor to come in.

“It’s Friday,” you answered, grabbing a paintbrush and using your fingers to work the paint out of the bristles. “They’ve got enough going on, I figured I’d give them a bit of a break.”

You heard Severus scoff as he approached you from behind.

“You’re too easy on them.”

“And you’re too hard on your own students, but you don’t see me waltzing into your classroom to nag.”

That earned a soft chuckle from the professor as he stood beside you.

“You can use magic to clean those.” Severus observed, nodding toward your fingers as you worked the leftover paint out of the brush.

“I know I can,” you shrug, watching the water beneath the brush turn a bright turquoise. “But I prefer not to. Helps me clear my mind a bit.”

“Hm.” Was the small response you got in reply. To your surprise, Severus reached into the sink and grabbed a paintbrush, mimicking your movements as he began cleaning it.

“Oh,” you exclaimed softly. “It’s okay, I can do that-”

“Too late,” Severus retorted, casting a quick glance at you out of the corner of his eye. “I’ve already started.”

The two of you scrubbed brushes in silence, and you just barely caught Severus let out a small, tired sigh. As you placed your final brush to the side to dry, you glanced at him.

“Rough day today?”

You had to hold in your giggles as he answered your question with the biggest eye roll you’d ever seen.

“That’s putting it lightly,” he muttered.

“Come,” you beckoned as you sat down in one of the empty seats in the middle of the class. You nodded for Severus to join you as you crossed one leg over the other and leaned back in your seat. “Tell me about it. What happened? Was it Potter again?

You smirked at the eye roll Severus gave you in response before tiredly making his way over to the seat across from you.

“Someone’s been stealing supplies for a Polyjuice potion,” he grumbled, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I have reasons to believe it’s Potter and his dunderhead friends.”

You bit back a smile, and raised an eyebrow. “What makes you think it’s him? Do you have evidence?”

“Trouble follows him wherever he goes, isn’t that evidence enough?”

You had trouble holding in a giggle, and Severus glared at you.

“He’s brewed Polyjuice potion before.” Severus continued. “It’s the only thing he can actually do well. And those specific ingredients keep going missing.”

You frown a little and shook your head.

“Really, Severus. I don’t know what you have against that boy, but you’ve got to give him a break,” you encouraged gently. “He’s got enough on his shoulders right now, with the Triwizard Tournament going on.”

“And what if he is stealing from my supplies?” Severus retorted.

“What if he isn’t?” You challenged calmly. Severus sighed again, shaking his head as he gazed at you.

“Should we place bets on whether it’s Potter who’s stealing from you?” You asked jokingly, leaning forward in your seat with a smirk. Severus pressed his lips together in a thin line.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because every damned time we make a bet, you win.”

You snickered at Severus’ remark, before standing up from your seat and placing your hand reassuringly on the professor’s shoulder. He looked up at you with dark eyes that warmed very slightly at your touch.

“I truly do not know how you always manage to see the good in people.” He murmured, sighing tiredly. You squeezed his shoulder lightly.

“I just… see the good in everything I guess.” You shrugged. “Even things that seem terrible can be beautiful, if they’re in the right lighting.”

Severus let out a little snort at your comment, shaking his head.

“C’mon grumpypants,” you teased lightly, patting your friend on the back. “I know what’ll cheer you up.”

You walked over to your desk and opened the far left drawer. Upon hearing the dull scrape of wood as the drawer pulled open, Severus looked over at you with the tiniest smile.

“Have you added any teas to your collection?” He asked. He kept a somewhat level expression, but you couldn’t help but grin at the hint of a hopeful tone in his voice.

“I went to Hogsmeade last weekend and got a few more. Some just for you. Come over here and pick one, I’ll put the kettle on.”

Severus stood up just as you moved to the corner of the room to fill the kettle. You noticed out of the corner of your eye how shadow-like he was: the way his cloak billowed slightly as he almost seemed to glide over to your desk.

You heard a few papers rustle as you filled the kettle, and that’s when your heart stopped.

Oh no, oh god no.

You forgot to move your sketchbook, bloody hell.

Maybe Severus was looking at something else, you thought to yourself. Maybe you misheard and he was only rifling through your tea stash-

“Is this… me?”

Nope. He found it. Shit.

You set the kettle down slowly, your hands trembling as you felt a rush of heat fly up to your cheeks.

“S-Sorry?”

You kept your eyes glued to the teacups on the small wooden countertop, trying your best not to cringe as you continued to hear pages being flipped over gently.

“Y/N…” Severus murmured. “You drew these?”

You chewed your lip, just about ready to sink through the floorboards at this point.

“Y-yes.” Your voice came out as a small squeak, barely even intelligible.

You squeezed your eyes shut as you heard gentle footsteps approach you from behind.

“Turn around,” Severus encouraged softly. Clenching your jaw, you tried to ignore the burning heat in your cheeks as you shuffled around to face Severus.

His dark eyes were swirling with so many emotions, you genuinely couldn’t tell what he was thinking. It terrified you. You looked down, and saw that he was holding one of your sketches in his hand.

“I’m sorry,” you whispered. “I don’t show those to anyone, they’re just for me to practice with…”

“This is how you see me?”

You heard Severus‘ voice catch in his throat, and you looked up to see his features had softened into a gentle and almost sad expression. You lowered your gaze to his hands again, taking a closer look at the sketch he brought over.

It was from the Yule Ball a few months ago. You had sketched Severus during dinner after you saw him throw his head back in a hearty laugh, thanks to a dirty joke Professor Sprout had casually dropped at the staff table that night. You couldn’t remember the joke for the life of you, but you’d never forget the way Severus’ eyes lit up with a rare joy few ever saw. Nor would you forget the way his hair curled that night, perfectly framing his face and making him look almost angelic.

“Joy looks good on you.” You explained in the tiniest whisper, pressing your lips together nervously. “I… that was one of my first times seeing you laugh, and I just…”

You trailed off, silently cursing the fact that your face was still as red as ever. Finally, to your relief, Severus set your sketch down. But when you looked up at him, you noticed his eyes were glassy.

Was he… crying?

“Oh.” You gasp softly. “Oh no, I’m sorry. It’s a terrible drawing, I know-”

Severus shook his head. “Stop bloody apologizing. It’s beautiful. All your sketches are. I had no idea.”

“Well, you weren’t supposed to find out.” You muttered, laughing your nerves out softly. Your heart nearly stopped as Severus reached out, gently cradling your hands in his.

“Thank you.” He murmured quietly. “For… what you said.”

You frowned. “What did I say?”

“About… seeing the joy in me,” he replied. “That’s perhaps the kindest thing anyone has ever said to me.”

Your heart sank as you took in Severus’ words. You looked up, your soft eyes meeting his dark ones.

“It’s true.” You said simply. “It doesn’t take an expert to see you’ve been through some real shit, Sev. You deserve to be happy.”

Severus froze at your words, unsure of what to do or how to react. Then, to your surprise, he took one more step forward and closed the distance between the two of you. He wrapped his arms around you, and you nearly gasped at how tightly he held you to him. You returned his embrace without hesitation, finally calming after the initial scare of Severus finding your sketches. He was warm. You could get used to this feeling.

“Thank you, Y/N.” You heard Severus whisper.

“For what?” You asked back just as softly.

“Showing me how you see the world. How you see… me.”

#snape x reader #harry potter #severus snape #snape imagine #snape x y/n #severus snape imagine #severus snape x reader #harry potter imagine #harry potter imagines

679 notes · View notes

weasleyreidstyles · 10 months ago

Text

Serendipity

chapter twelve

summary: it was only meant to be a purely transactional relationship. he would help her strengthen her abilities in return for her getting his friends out of his father's nasty path. he didn't mean to fall for her, but loving her was the easiest thing in his dark world.

no use of y/n, but your general nickname is Meadow. all characters are aged up to be over 18.

pairings: mattheo riddle x fem!ravenclaw reader; platonic!slytherins x fem!reader; platonic!golden trio x fem!reader

warning(s): none

series masterlist; previous part; next part

The rest of March passed by at an excruciating pace. True to his word, Harry had essentially isolated you from everyone you held dear. He glared at you in the corridors when you passed by and you felt the familiar gutting feeling of guilt every single time. Especially when Ron had finally been released from the Hospital Wing.

You found out that Ron was finally out through Neville Longbottom, who had asked if you'd spoken to Ron since he'd returned. He looked surprised by your confused face and told you that he would be officially out after lunch that day. Not even Hermione had come to find you, not that you were entirely surprised. You had made your way towards the ward with Pansy's elbow crooked in your own, for stability, when the trio and Ginny exited the double oak doors.

The look that Harry gave you was gutting, but the look of utter betrayal on Ron's face made your heart stutter in your chest.

"Ron-" you begin, but he cuts you off before you can even begin to explain yourself.

"Don't." he spat, voice raspy from sleep. "Harry told us what you obviously weren't ever going to."

You inhaled harshly, the arm looped with Pansy's tightening imperceptibly. "Let me explain, please."

"I don't want to hear any of your excuses, Meadow." the way he said your name was so foreign to you. "How could you fuck the enemy? Seriously, you know who his father is."

He's not his father! You wanted to scream; to shout to the rooftops. But words had evaded you. Tears filled your eyes immediately and you barely hear as Pansy shouts at him, no qualms for the fact that he had only recently recovered from being poisoned by her friends.

Hermione and Ginny barely spare the two of you a glance as they push the two pissed off boys away and down the corridor, the sound of Hermione defending you and chastising Ron for his cruelty is merely a whisper to you.

Pansy puts a hand on your forearm, thumb tracing soft circles. She breathes your name so delicately that you're surprised you even hear it. "Meadow? They're gone."

Your breath hitches minutely and your lip trembles as the tears that had been collecting in your eyes, finally fall.

"Oh, honey." she murmurs before pulling you into the tightest hug ever. "It's okay." she says over and over as she comforts you. "If they can't see how extraordinary you are, then they didn't deserve your friendship in the first place."

You only sob harder.

"Let's go to my dorm, yeah." she says. "Have a girl's day, just us two?"

You nod once and allow her to guide you down to the dungeons, both of you ignoring the circle of your friends in one corner of the Slytherin common room, who look at the two of your passing figures in bewilderment.

You spent a whole weekend with Pansy. But the hole in your chest never seemed to go away, no matter how much the two of you gossiped and laughed.

~∞~

True to his word, Mattheo tried to help in his own way, by providing ample distraction in the form of siphon training. He had told you that his friends were willing to help you, too. It was the least they could do, he had said. And thank Merlin that they were so willing.

You had finally mastered effectively drawing an adequate amount of power from random magical objects that Mattheo would spell, but you couldn't fight the dizzying feeling that overtook you each time you succeeded.

One day, he came to you in the library, Blaise in tow.

"Hi boys." you say with a small smile, but Mattheo could tell that you were hiding your emotions from them – Harry, Ron and Hermione were only sitting a few bookshelves away from you and you had never felt more alone.

"Hello, love." Mattheo mumbled as he pressed a featherlight kiss to your cheek, taking the seat beside you and tucking a loose strand of hair behind your ear before his hand rested on the top of your thigh. He watched as your pretty eyes brightened almost instantly, but the faint sound of Ron's guffawing laughter made them dim as if the light had never been present in the first place. His hand squeezed your thigh affectionately.

Blaise took the seat opposite the two of you and having grown used to the two of you acting 'disgustingly coupley' over the course of the month, he didn't react to Mattheo's blatent concern. You noticed that he toyed with some sort of spherical object as he made himself comfortable.

"What's that, Blaise?" you ask, and he holds it up so you can see a transparent glass sphere that was barely the size of a golf ball. You tilt your head curiously.

"It's a conduit." he says, dark brown eyes tracing the smooth edges with precision. "When you siphon from anything with a form of magic imbedded within it, like the ground or a person, you can transfer it into this and it will hopefully take on the strain of the power, while also giving you access to it."

"So in simpler terms," Mattheo says, hand stroking up your thigh lightly, "you'll be able to do what you've been successfully practicing without worrying about passing out. In theory."

"What do you mean 'in theory'?" you ask, turning to Mattheo, who looks contemplatively at the conduit in Blaise's hand.

"Well there's no information about it helping a siphoner. Only that wizards use them to trap an extra bit of their magic in, just in case their magical core is compromised."

Like a horcrux. You thought to yourself, not noticing the way Mattheo imperceptibly tenses. He had a constant foothold in your mind, because it brought you comfort. But he could hear every one of your thoughts.

"So we – well actually Theo – thought that it would work in the same way." He hesitated to mention that Theo had had a hand in helping you. You still had not spoken to him. Not since you found out about his obvious involvement in poisoning Ron. You hadn't so much as uttered a word to him: not when you're in class and certainly not during patrols. "He just wants to help."

"Right." you hummed, "Well hopefully it does. I don't particularly feel like passing out today."

Blaise and Mattheo exchanged a look that you failed to miss. You huffed.

"Thank you Blaise." you say, and through gritted teeth, you ask him to thank Theo too.

~∞~

By the time April had come around, you had made peace with the fact that your friendships with the Golden trio and company were well and truly over. Your time was spent with the Slytherin group in their common room, instead. You wondered how you'd gone so long without fully knowing the whole group (you knew it was because you couldn't think of anything worse than jeopardising your existing friendships at the time of getting to know Theo and Pansy last year). Being around them filled a void that you didn't know existed in the depths of your very being.

Blaise shared your affinity towards muggle literature (he was currently reading the Great Gatsby and the two of you found immense joy when raving about eachother's annotations and perspectives).

Enzo was one of the funniest people you'd ever met and both of you enjoyed pissing Draco off to the maximum. He was also very sweet and caring under his nonchalant exterior but his wit was sharp as a knife – your twin snark was received abysmally from everyone else.

Draco was a little harder to get along with, considering the hatred he harboured for Harry, but he was, perhaps, the most sympathetic with you (besides Pansy, Theo and Mattheo) over your lost friendships.

These people were the only ones who did not outcast you, because they understood you – even your own housemates saw how you had become distanced from your old friends and they began to grow weary of who kept you company instead.

You were a group of pariahs, a wide berth always separating you from the rest of the student body.

You couldn't find it in yourself to care.

You finally talked to Theo and he apologised profusely for his part in Ron's hospitalisation, as did Enzo and even Draco. But like Mattheo, they seemed to find great difficulty in explaining themselves to you, clutching at where their hearts were as he spoke, as if it was trying to claw its way from each of their chests.

That's how you figured out the Unbreakable Vow that came hand in hand with the Dark Marks marring their left forearms. Mattheo, Theo, Enzo and Draco could not utter a word of what they were tasked to do, otherwise they would die a slow and painful death. It gave you even more incentive to get them out somehow. It would be difficult, but you'd never stop trying.

The conduit that Blaise had given to you, lay against your collarbone on a dainty chain of sterling silver, gifted by Pansy. It had developed whorls of varying shapes and sizes as you practiced siphoning day after day and you could feel the hum of power within it. It would only be released upon you shattering the glass. You were gaining control with each practiced session.

You were sat with Mattheo in a quiet corner of the Slytherin common room, focusing on a box of marbles that he had charmed individually for you to practice. The hum of your magic was faint, but the indigo glow was bright and pulsing as invisible hands sifted through the glassy orbs collecting the surges of magic with each stroke, reflecting rainbows of colour across your faces.

He had thought of this idea one evening while you laughed with Enzo at Draco's expense. He had been admiring the way your head tilted back as you heartily laughed, the way your hair cascaded over your shoulders and over his hoodie that you donned, how your eyes sparkled under the low light of the common room. He thought it was possibly the most ethereal sound he'd ever been blessed to hear.

Mattheo began with small objects. Putting a little bit of his magic into them for you to siphon out. Your magical cores mingled and danced around eachother every time you did so successfully and your conduit would glow with a symphony of colour before it would extinguish until the next time you channelled the combined power into it. He found you extraordinary.

He knew he was treading on dangerous waters. He should've never let this thing – this beautiful thing between the two of you – get as far as it had. He should not have been the cause for your broken friendships. But he couldn't help it. He was addicted to you in all senses of the word.

He couldn't get enough. And maybe that made him selfish. But everything he did in this life was for his friends, his family. So he wanted to be selfish, just this once.

Because Mattheo Riddle was in love with you.

You had integrated into his found family with ease. He protects his family. So he would protect you, too. You had lost your old friendships, but new ones had formed. Fresh, pure and innocent.

But war has a funny way of sullying the beautiful things in life. It's only a matter of time before it's ravenous claws ripped through his brief moment of peace.

~∞~

i don't really like this chapter because of all the time jumps but i needed to speed through the timeline a bit lol

and it was mean tto be slightly more fluffy than the last few, but it seems that i just can't resist writing angst.

thankyou for all the love on chapter eleven though, it means so much 🥹🫶🏼🫶🏼

taglist:

(striked out users are ones that i couldn't tag)

@camille-1019 @lovelyygirl8 @xluansstuff @babeylover @thejadeazalea @undercover-smutlover @adhxmoony @dreamingofonceuponatime @thepassionatereader @urmomsgayforme5 @aphroditeisamilf @devotedlycrookeddonut @purplegirls-posts @nofacenonamelikekira @foxboyapologist @lafrone @lovely-maryj @nromanovaswife @leeknows-wife @dracygf @wildlyobserving @ravenclawprincess33 @melllinaa @vellicora @lantsovheiress @emiliahoward @stunkbiggu @vcosette @prongsprincessworld @mattiesgirl @rachmmb @x-kermit-x @sun-fiower-seed @cas-planet @certaindreampost @weirdowithnobeardo @mikalovesicecream @sunasbbie @rainy-darling @faeriepigeons @lovely-blackinnon @hiireadstuff @gimalo135 @elsafromcabinsix @moonlightreader649 @blueshome @nopedefe @spencerreidsthings @navs-bhat @agent-tempest @magimtz23 @y0urm0m12 @sbrn0905 @leona-hawthorne @whatsupb18 @moni-cah @taylorann2013 @unstablereader @gisellesprettylies @nat1221

#mattheo riddle x you #mattheo x you #mattheo riddle #mattheo riddle x reader #pansy parkinson #pansy parkinson x reader #slytherin boys #slytherin boys x reader #enzo berkshire #blaise zabini #draco malfoy #ron weasley #harry potter x reader #ron weasley x reader #flangst #found family #serendipity series

415 notes · View notes

trulyumai · 4 months ago

Text

pizza time!

—pairing: Eddie Munson / Reader

synopsis: with rain interrupting your plans, you and Eddie decide to have a lazy day. did someone say pizza time?

—warnings: none. just fluff!

“Eddie knock it off—!” fingers danced across your waist and around the expansion of your hips. It was a mistake telling the man how ticklish your sides were, now that he took advantage of it.

“I can’t hear you sweetheart, I think you gotta speak more clearly.” His ringed fingers didn’t end there assault, he even went as far as to blow raspberries on your neck.

“Eee— okay okay! I give!” Finally ceasing his movements, the guitarist leaned against you heavily. Panting and out of breath his hand came up to cradle your cheek. “So I win… that means pizza for dinner?” A smile broke out onto his face, showing the little laugh lines molded into his skin.

“Pizza for dinner,” you hummed. Already moving towards the dial phone to appease your needy boyfriend with the much needed greasy cheese slices.

Eddie, slouched on the couch, already wanting to reach out for your frame. Pouting, he waited as you finished the call with the restaurant, and with open palms gestured for you to come back.

“Yes, okay. Thank you Reese.”

Eddie frowned, “how the hell do you know their name?”

“Because we order every weekend, dummy.” Back in his grasp you molded against him. “Someone has a problem with indulging themselves.” Your man let out a dramatic gasp, instantly disagreeing with such a statement.

Although you were having pizza again, you were so glad these lazy days came to fruition.

It rained all day today; leaving you and Eddie to sit around and just bask in each other’s existence. The man could be happy with every day like this, but with you busy with finals and Eddie finding new gigs it was getting harder and harder to have time together.

“Do you love me?” Eddie rubbed his hands across your back, somehow trying to pull you closer. If it were possible— the man would tear his skin open for you to nestle right in.

Or was that too much?

“Of course I do! You’re my everything,” hands grasped at his cheeks, demanding his full attention and halting the wandering, nervous eyes.

“And you think im handsome?” His digits were cold against your bare skin, they lightly found their way under your (his), baggy shirt. Moving up and down comfortingly.

“I think you’re the handsomest, prettiest dungeon master in existence.”

Eddie laughed. “I am the prettiest, aren’t I?”

Humming in agreement your head leaned down and rested onto the man’s chest, now facing the little television that graced the living room.

“I can’t wait to start a life with you, baby. Little you’s wandering’ round, a cute little house.” Eddie sighed, pressing his slightly chapped lips to the base of your head.

“Woah there big guy. One step at a time,” you traced the line around his jaw. “First we need to graduate. And then we’ll go from there, hm?”

“Okay, okay, im just saying. I hope they get your eyes.” sinking back down into the smushed cushion, Eddie relaxed.

…

“Do you think the pizzas close?”

A pause.

“…No hunny.”

——

Taglist!

@ali-r3n & @anukulee (If you wish to be tagged in future Eddie Munson blurbs or stories, let me know!)

#fluff #eddie munson x female reader #eddie munson x y/n #eddie munson x you #eddie munson x reader #eddie x you #eddie x reader #Eddie #eddie munson #stranger things x you #stranger things x reader #stranger things imagine #stranger things #netflix series #can you get sick of pizza #hopefully not with Eddie involved

169 notes · View notes

romirola · 3 months ago

Text

Headcanons for the Shaw Pack’s Favorite Activities at a Renaissance Fair

Last weekend, I went to my first Renaissance Fair and had a blast! So many things to do, performances to see, food to eat, and impromptu character interactions to share with actors/fair-goers. My only reasonable next step is to think about the Shaw Pack attending and enjoying a Ren Fair, too. Yes, they all dress up. (Pss- So did I! A censored Ren Fair Romi pic is below the cut. Alt txt included.)

David: Attending the blacksmith demonstration. David is fascinated by solid craftsmanship, and blacksmith work is the epitome of craft. David listens intently, learning all about the historical and cultural significance of the art-science hybrid as the blacksmith molds a blade before David’s eyes.

Angel: Dragon-egg painting. Angel leans into the fantasy elements of the fair, despite David’s grumbling that there’s nothing Renaissance about dragons. Angel meticulously paints a gorgeous dragon egg that could’ve been professionally made, all while conversing in-character with the dragon-wrangler who staffed the egg-painting station. The dragon-wrangler assures Angel that the dragon will “hatch” will grow into a majestic beast who will be loyal and loving, eternally grateful for the care they showed when the dragon was merely an egg.

Asher: The bawdy poetry reading. Asher wasn’t super thrilled to discover he read the map wrong and showed up to the bawdy poet’s performance instead of the public shaming scene, but as soon as the poet performed the first poem, he was hooked. Asher couldn’t help but laugh, not only because of the content of the poems, but because of the animated way the poet recited the words, moved about the stage, and even engaged with the audience.

Babe: Getting chosen to participate in the juggling show. The only thing that amazed Babe more than the performers juggling all sorts of objects (some dangerous, some silly) as they performed acrobatic feats was when the performers invited them on stage to “help” with their next trick of spinning plates. To their surprise and delight, Babe was able to do exactly as the juggler instructed and keep the plate spinning. They took a bow as they audience cheered, Asher screaming over everyone as he celebrated his mate.

Milo: Ringing the bell at the strongman game. The game is notoriously rigged, but Milo was up to the challenge. As soon as the bell rang out, a few character actors came over to congratulate him and decree him to the strongest man in all the village. They chanted his name and, upon hearing the commotion, the fair’s Queen made her way over to Milo to knight him as Sir Milo the Strong. She also bestowed upon him a handful of food vouchers, which Milo shared with the rest of the pack so they could all feast on all the food the fair had to offer.

Sweetheart: Watching the jousting tournament. Sweetheart loves how jousting is a blend of so many things they love: theatre, violence, and competition. They cheer as loudly as they can for the knight who fights for their section of the field, eyes glued to the combat. After the joust, even though their knight lost, they made their way to the fence to tell him he fought bravely and that he’d always be a champion in their heart. The knight was so moved by their admission, he let them pet his horse.

Darling: Watching the falconry show. Darling was in awe as the birds zipped and flew through the air, all while showing off how precise their tracking and hunting skills are. All of the birds of prey were rehabilitated rescues from the wild, which only made Darling respect and support these birds’ message of wildlife conservation and preservation even more.

Sam: Touring the dungeon museum. Sam was oddly comforted by the fact that no matter how many centuries passed, there were a few universals of humanity that transcended time. Although pain and torture were a constant obsession with humanity, Sam figured, that meant comfort and healing were, too. For as long as there had been people to inflict pain, there were people who eased pain. That thought inspires him.

98 notes · View notes

pixeechix21 · 1 year ago

Text

The Ritual

Reader x Slytherin boys (Matteo and Theo)

Summary: When the ritual begins, the dark gives light to desires that need to be satisfied. You are a Slytherin and there’s the initiation for Last Year students. Pansy begs you to go, but what makes you agree is because, the Slytherin boys were betting you wouldn’t because you're a goody two shoes. When you arrive at the bonfire in the Forbidden Forest you're teased by Matteo and Theo.

TW: where do I start??? degradation kink, praise kink, primal, threesome, rough, M/M/F, blood, fighting, oral, p in v, fear kink, being chased, almost suggestion of rape (didn’t happen phew), trapping(idk wt it means necessarily but like it makes sense), teasing

WC:2.8K ish

Heading towards the dungeons you were ready to take off your tie and huddle up, hidden away from them. Entering the high vaulted main room, you search for them making sure you're safe. Pansy shrieks excitedly as soon as you take a step further. She runs up and hugs, “bitch where the fuck have you been!” she takes hold of you and steers you to the large leather couches situated in an arc, full of giggling girls. “Hey, y/n,” a couple smile and continue gossiping in whispering voices. You let yourself curl up between Pansy and Oliva.

“Yeah, Snape wanted me after class to talk about extra work,” you explain, trying to play it cool and that you definitely weren’t getting some from Gryffindor.

“Boo! You overachiever,” Pansy teases. “So you going?” She looks eagerly. It takes you a moment to realize what she was asking.

“Ehhhhh-”

“For the love of god, you better be,” she threatens.

“But I have to study and honestly I don’t want to be out there freezing my ass off,” you complain. You wanted to go but you really did have work you hadn’t done any of the assignments for tomorrow.

“You won’t be freezing your ass off if someone’s grabbing it. Pleeease,” she grabs your arms giving you faux puppy dog eyes. “We can even leave. After midnight,” she negotiates. You’re unsure, you’re low key excited about the Ritual, but… your brain tries to reason.

“Yeah pleeease, I know someone that’d want to get some,” Matteo's voice mocks from behind us. Aw shit, the Heirs.

“Shut up Matteo, go find a fourth year to play with,” you retaliate facing the group of boys. Each tall and darkly handsome each in their own right.

"Aww don't say that you know i prefer third years," he mockingly puts a hand to his heart in hurting. "I was merely offering an option."

"Ew Matteo," you, Pansy and Liv say in unison, rolling your eyes. "Anyways she would go for a dick like you, she's got Simon from Ravenclaw to help" she points out completely forgetting that that was said in confidence and that he broke it off to pursue "true love" or some shit.

"We all know Simon couldn't please you," Tom chirps in walking along, already bored of this child's play. You roll your eyes and face forward ignoring their laughs echoing down from the boy's dorms.

"He's not wrong he has that rat out of a sewer vibe," Liv agrees watching as your face screws up in a smile as you agree.

"I'll go," you finally say.

"Yes bitch!" Pansy squeals again, jumping up and running to your room.

The ritual is a customary initiation for final year Slytherins. All the staff know about it but they don't have enough energy to deal with stopping it from happening. It happens on the last weekend of autumn term, where everyone drinks endlessly and there's always a game involved. Hunt or be hunted; separate the mundane from the ambitious.

As soon as Snape is reported to be tucked away in his master room, the students slowly scuttle out of the dungeons like mice, out to the dark forest.

Pansy is readjusting her tits to be pushed out further, you shake your head giggling. "Shut up you're blessed with amazing tits," she dismisses you pulling down your shirt to stop you from hiding yourself. "Show what your mama gave you babies." The cold encircles your body and the full moon lights the path into the forest. In the middle behind a tangle of trees there's a small clearing in the middle a large bonfire burns. You see a page flutter up in the flames, probably used old books instead of fire, you think. You're nervous, unsure of the darkness and the rowdy teens drinking. Pansy spotted her boy toy and she left the bottle in hand. You walk around talking to others, slowly warming up as the fire burns brighter. Then just as everyone settled down, there was a shouting announcing, “everyone shut the fuck up!” On top of a newly fallen tree stood Draco.

“As you all know tonight is the sacred night of the Ritual!” Everyone lifts their drinks shouting in excitement. “Alright alright, tonight’s special game is Tag, boys versus girls, as we are gentlemen we’ll let the ladies have a head start.” He goes on mischievously. “The Forbidden Forest is filled with monstrous creatures, but don’t lose sight of the real dangers. Us.” There’s geering all around. You search for Pansy but she’s nowhere to be seen. Don’t be a pussy, a small voice tells you. Inhaling deeply you accept the consequences whatever they will be. It’s a game, and you’re the chestmaster you got this, you hype yourself out.

“We’ll start in 10 minutes,” Tom shouts. Everyone spreads out, you head out to search for a route. “The winners will be given the honorary title of King and Queen of Slytherine, and will be placed as head girl and boy of Slytherine house.”

“You warmed up?” Matteo cuts you off, eyeing you up and down. “I can give you a hand. Get you ready,” he steps closer. You instinctively step back.

“Where you off to little bunny, we haven’t said go,” Theo breathes out smoke. The pungent smoke fills your lungs as you suck in your breath. He’s directly behind you, sandwiching you in.

“Go fuck yourself,” you say snarkily. Your chest rising up and down, tits rising and falling out of your small shirt. Matteo’s dead eyes look down to your chest, and smiles slightly, running his tongue over his teeth. Like a wolf ready to eat.

“Trust me, I’d rather you do it,” he says slowly, inching closer. Theo chuckles as you step back again, this time his large hands take hold of your waist to steady you. A small hum of agreement comes from him.

“I’d fuck your dad before you,” you spit out glaring up at Matteo. Challenging him further.

“Ha! I never thought power would be what gets you hot and heavy y/n,” he teases.

You’ve had enough, there’s too much adrenaline and alcohol running through your body to the point you’ve lost all reasonability, because suddenly you’re getting extremely hot. There’s a stirring down between your legs as he grabs your chin so that you look up at him. Feeling both of their hands holding you there, you feel trapped, encircled and being toyed with.

Draco is counting down to zero and you’re starting to anticipate your escape. “Be careful little bunny,” Matteo starts.

“Wouldn’t want a big bad wolf to catch you,” Theo finishes, flicking his cigarette away. As Draco shouts zero, they both step aside, a devilish smirk plastered on their faces. They watch you intently as you start to walk away backwards then you turn around and bolt it.

There’s screams and giggles of girls as we make our way through the dark forest. I don’t even want to be the head girl you think regretting coming, the comfortable thought of your books and studies sounds like a much better option. You’ve slowed your running shouting and giggles only distant echoes now. “Run run, bunny,” a voice says. You stop spinning around trying to gauge where the voice came from. The silence chills you to your bones, and you go into a sprint again. There’s laughing all around. You want to barf from the heavy breathing and alcohol. You check behind you, “GOT YOU!” Caleb James shouts, scaring the living shit out of you as he jumps out and takes hold of you. “Look who it is, the slytherin heirs’ slut,” he jeers, his breath stinks as he talks closely to your face, you turn your head in disgust. “Bet you’ll open your legs for me,” he starts to manhandle you and you scream for help. Your wand had fallen to the floor when he caught you. “Shut up slut,” he shakes you vigorously. There’s a snap of a twig in the dark. He stops his movements. You try to break free. Two dark figures step out of the shadows, their black clothes like camouflage. You never thought you’d be happy to see them. One of them advances upon you guys, he raises his fist and punches Caleb. A splatter of blood falls on your face, you step back watching them. Matteo dodges a swing and gets him in the ribs. Theo goes from behind and holds Caleb in a lock, “don’t you ever fucking try that you mud blood,” Matteo growls as he lands punches mercilessly. “Let him go he’s mine,” Theo steps back and Matteo tackles him to the floor.

Caleb gets Matteo breaking blood, a small stream coursing on his face. “Stop! Teo stop you’re going to kill him!” You yell. “Stop him Theo!” You jerk your head to Theo who’s watching happily taking a drag from his cigarette.

“No this is all him,” he chuckles. Matteo’s knuckles are covered in blood and the boy isn’t responding any more. Face swollen and already purpling. After a second of two, Theo pushes off the tree, “alright I’m bored. Get off Matteo,” Matteo grabs Caleb's shirt and pulls him close, he says something that you can’t hear and then pushes him down.

He looks up at you as he gets up. “You okay?” He says quietly. His breath is erratic, a wild excited look fills his dark eyes. “You didn’t have to do that,” you start.

“A thank you would be polite,” he says sarcastically, approaching you. You can smell the blood and mint and he exhales from his mouth. Without you realizing your hand goes up and swipes his split lip, wiping some blood away. Suddenly he stops you by your wrist mid air. He takes you in close. He towers over you, “thank you,” you whisper. You’re released and snap out of the trance. Theo offers his blunt, taking it you relax as the smoke cradles you. “You caught me,” you laugh, not sure how to process those brief seconds you were scared for your life.

“What’s the prize?” Theo teases, raising an eyebrow.

“Come here and I’ll give it to you,” you joke. Well you thought you were joking until his shadow blocks the light of the moon and his black eyes gleam cravingly. You pull his head down, he opens his mouth slightly. You kiss him. His hands wrap around you and his tongue dominates your mouth. Ravaging your lips. Wanting to play with them like they did you, you break apart he looks disappointed at this. You put the blunt to your lips and breathe, exhaling as you eye Matteo who’s looking jealous at the scene in front of him. “And you,” you direct at him. Already your panties are wet with the idea of having them both. At the same time.

Pansy would laugh her ass off, you think humorously.

He comes to you with his hands snaking to your ass as he pulls you in close. He licks his lips, his eyes hooded heavily in lust. His kiss was determined. He wanted to show you. Force you to see that he’s the one you need. Behind you you feel Theo press himself into your ass, already growing harder you feel his dick on your back making you gulp. Reaching for him you pull his face into your neck, obediently he places hurtful kisses and bites up and down it. Matteo’s hot body firmly pushes you to Theo. Matteo’s hand needs your tits, as Theo’s moves down in front to your panties, his cold hands play between your wetness. You moan as you're over-stimulated. Turning your face to take Theo’s lips and bite. A clash of teeth and tongue. “You’re so wet for us bunny,” he moans. Matteo distances himself and looks at you both. Staring. He gets turned on at the idea of you entangled in his best friend's hands. He envisions himself giving you unbearable pleasure. How it’s hard to restrain himself and take you all for himself. “Take it off. Now.” He crosses his arms glaring at you as you make eye contact with him. Theo breaks away. First your pants fall to the floor. Your nipple hardens evermore at the chill and pure neediness. “More,” Theo presses. Lifting your shirt over your head that joins your pants on the floor. Tantalizingly you undo your bra. Then look through your lashes as you take off your pink panties.

They inhale at the sight of your beautiful naked body, both of them on the edge of tearing you apart. Your skin buzzes excitedly as you get on your knees in front of them. Your mouth starts salivating at the thought of having them both. “Want us both?” Matteo provokes. You nod your head, your hands eager to undo their belts.

“Greedy little bitch,” Theo takes your hair and pulls it harshly. Your clit is crying to be touched, throbbing painfully. You can’t take it anymore. An unspoken agreement went between the boys, Matteo took you and Theo stood and watched. You have no time to react as you're thrown down, you hear the jingle and zipper coming undone. His hand palms your ass bruising it, you feel him slide his large tip up and down your slit, pushing in slightly then pulling out. Sexual frustration builds in you so much that you press your ass to him. “Needy little whore,” he chuckles as he thrusts himself in. Your back arches as he unfurls his hatred for you. There is no gentleness in his thrusts, none. He takes his hand to your front and starts edging you to your orgasm. Circling fast then slowly, taking you almost to the top then lets you settle down. Over and over he plays these cruel games. Theo eyes flare up as you look at him, eyes half open as if drugged by the sex, mouth open, you pant and moan.

“You sound so pretty,” he crouches down, clearing a loose strand of hair, tucking it delicately behind your ear. He kisses you then stands up taking off his belt. “Take this Matteo, give her a lesson or two about power,” he hands his belt to Teo. He releases his grip from you and snaps the belt. The loud snap echoes in the dark.

The Ritual so sexual and forbidden, it inspires even the most demonic of creatures.

Matteo lets the belt hit you once, twice, three times each time, stinging more than before. You’re going to hate sitting down tomorrow. Theo comes back into your sight, his hard cock begging to be released.

“Open wide bunny,” Matteo commands, setting down the belt and going back to circling your clit feverishly. As you come opening your mouth to let out sounds of pleasure Theo thrusts his dick into your mouth. His hands steady your head as he face fucks you, “fuck you’re better than I’d ever imagined,” you see sweat build on his forehead. “Look at you, such a beautiful little whore,” he wipes the strands of hair that are plastered to your face.

“Fuck- God y/n you feel like heaven,” Matteo brakes out, as his own fucking doesn’t slow. You're so full that you start to feel another build up, it’s too much. It’s just enough. It’s not enough. Delirium comes over you as you cunt throbs, and you can breathe. The boys’ moaning and animalistic fucking sounds like a symphony to you. You cry out as you come again losing all control of your body. Theo finishes and wipes his come from your lips and you lick them clean as told so. Matteo’s nails mark you as he finishes ruthlessly.

All three of you are a mess. Theo offers you a hand to stand up as Matteo helps you dress, picking out leaves from your clothes. Both treating you like a queen. You are lost, and they guide you back. “We found her! The Queen of Slytherin!” Theo takes your hand and bows. You are absolutely bamboozled at the fact that there were students playing tag and that they’re all cheering not knowing what just happened. Pansy yelled happily and you just nodded, thanking people as you passed by and headed to bed.

Because God knows the pain you’ll be in tomorrow.

#slytherin #slytherin boys #matteo riddle #fem!reader #smut #hunted #hogwarts houses #hogwarts school of witchcraft and wizardry #theodore nott #x reader #draco malfoy #temptation #so hot 🔥🔥🔥#degrading k1nk #praise

337 notes · View notes