#Identify and Seize

[vittoriodicriscio]

How to Identify and Seize Untapped Market Opportunities

As a business expert, I often emphasize the importance of recognizing and capturing untapped market opportunities. In today’s rapidly shifting business landscape, there are numerous avenues for growth hidden within emerging trends, customer needs, and gaps left unaddressed by competitors. Identifying these opportunities requires a proactive approach—one that blends research, data analysis, and a strategic focus on customer feedback. Let’s dive into several practical strategies for uncovering these hidden markets and turning them into profitable ventures.

Tracking Emerging Trends and Technologies

A cornerstone of identifying market opportunities is staying updated on emerging trends and technological advances. By observing what’s gaining traction, you can anticipate shifts in consumer preferences before they’re fully realized. This approach allows you to align your offerings with the market’s future direction rather than just current demands.

Take, for example, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation. These technologies are transforming industries and creating new demands. Businesses leveraging these tools early on can develop solutions for needs that competitors may not yet recognize. Regularly reviewing industry reports, trend forecasts, and innovation-focused publications provides insights into what consumers might value in the near future, helping you prepare your products or services accordingly.

Engaging with Customers to Uncover Needs

One of the best sources of information about potential market opportunities is your existing customer base. By actively listening to customers—whether through surveys, social media feedback, or customer service interactions—you gain a clearer picture of unmet needs or frustrations they experience. Often, customers will provide insights into what they wish was available or how they believe existing solutions could improve.

For instance, in the tech sector, users might frequently express a need for simpler, more intuitive interfaces. This feedback provides valuable direction for a company seeking to differentiate itself by prioritizing user-friendly design. Consistently engaging with your audience allows you to pick up on patterns, anticipate emerging needs, and adapt your strategy to meet those needs proactively.

Conducting Competitor Analysis to Identify Market Gaps

While it’s essential to focus on what your business does best, studying competitors offers insight into market opportunities they might be missing. Examining the strengths and weaknesses of competitors’ products, services, and customer service strategies can reveal gaps in their offerings, which could be profitable for you to explore.

Consider a scenario where competitors target high-end clientele in a specific industry. This leaves a gap for a more budget-friendly alternative that still meets essential quality standards. Identifying and catering to underserved segments differentiates your brand and allows you to attract a new customer base. By positioning your offerings as solutions to specific gaps, you capture audiences that may have previously felt overlooked.

Leveraging Data Analytics for Strategic Insights

Data analytics is invaluable for discovering patterns and trends in customer behavior that might indicate untapped opportunities. With tools like Google Analytics, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and social media analytics, businesses can uncover insights that help refine their understanding of customer needs.

For example, data might reveal that a significant portion of your website traffic is coming from a geographic region where your product has not yet been marketed. This could indicate an opportunity to expand your reach. Similarly, tracking customer purchasing patterns can help you identify complementary products or services that could increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. Analyzing data reveals where demand exists and allows for more targeted, efficient marketing strategies.

Focusing on Niche Markets for Growth

Niche markets—those specific segments of the population with distinct needs—can be incredibly profitable when approached correctly. Rather than trying to compete in overcrowded markets, focusing on niche audiences enables businesses to build brand loyalty within smaller, more specialized groups.

For instance, within the food industry, there has been growing demand for gluten-free, vegan, or organic options. Companies catering specifically to these dietary preferences attract customers looking for these precise solutions, creating a dedicated customer base. By focusing on niches, you’re fulfilling a demand and positioning your brand as an industry specialist, which helps to build credibility and trust with that audience.

Innovating Through Experimentation and Testing

Innovation is essential for discovering new market opportunities, and it doesn’t always have to involve groundbreaking inventions. Often, a simple adjustment to an existing product or service can lead to new opportunities. Experimenting with small changes, pilot programs, or limited releases allows you to gauge customer interest without a full-scale launch.

Consider a software provider that decides to create a mobile-friendly version of their platform to accommodate professionals who work on the go. This minor adjustment could attract a new demographic of users, such as freelancers or remote workers, who may have previously overlooked the platform. Small-scale experimentation allows you to measure demand, reducing risk while still tapping into new opportunities.

Collaborating with Industry Partners and Influencers

Strategic collaborations can be highly effective in reaching untapped markets. Partnerships with brands that serve complementary audiences—or collaborations with influencers who have a loyal following—can introduce your products to new customer segments and expand brand visibility.

Take, for example, a fitness equipment brand collaborating with a wellness influencer. This partnership can introduce the brand’s offerings to a targeted audience that values fitness and health, potentially boosting product awareness and sales. Partnerships and influencer collaborations can be particularly impactful in niche markets, where recommendations from trusted sources carry significant weight. They offer a way to establish credibility and engage audiences that might not be accessible through traditional marketing channels.

Monitoring and Adapting to Consumer Behavior Changes

Consumer preferences are continually evolving, and keeping track of these shifts is essential for identifying new market opportunities. Using tools such as social media listening, customer feedback, and demographic data, businesses can stay tuned into changes in consumer values and expectations. This proactive approach ensures that your offerings remain relevant as customer priorities shift.

For instance, the rise of eco-conscious consumers has led many companies to offer sustainable products. By monitoring and responding to these changes, you align your business with your audience’s evolving values, opening up potential for growth within an emerging market. Staying responsive and adaptable to these shifts keeps your brand relevant and positions you to capitalize on changes in consumer demand.

Steps to Identify Untapped Market Opportunities

Research Trends: Stay informed on emerging trends and technologies.

Engage with Customers: Use feedback to identify unmet needs.

Analyze Competitors: Spot gaps in competitors' offerings.

Leverage Data Analytics: Use data for market insights.

Target Niche Markets: Focus on underserved segments.

Innovate and Experiment: Test new ideas to assess demand.

Collaborate Strategically: Partner with influencers and brands.

In Conclusion

The ability to identify and seize untapped market opportunities is a powerful skill for any business leader. By keeping an eye on trends, listening closely to customers, and continuously analyzing data, companies can find valuable openings that drive growth and innovation. Focusing on niche markets, experimenting with new ideas, and forming strategic partnerships also allow businesses to gain a competitive edge. In today’s fast-paced world, businesses that proactively seek and capitalize on market gaps set themselves up for immediate success and create a strong foundation for sustained growth and relevance. Building a business that is responsive to customer needs and adaptable to change is essential for staying ahead in any industry.

[brothersonahotelbed]

read your poem youre CRAZY YOURE INSANE. HATE YOU *starts violently making out with you*

US DURING THE DIVINE ACT OF CREATION !!!!!

[lilietsblog]

Things I think sims 4 is getting wrong that they should do better next time

The system of controlling characters across multiple locations. Literally the worst it's been in any Sims game so far. I get the tradeoffs, but this is not it. Heavily discourages large households (since you can't control them all at the same time if you want to make use of the fun stuff you can do in locations other than home).

The ridiculous amount of mechanics that impact Nothing outside of themselves. Shoutout to university "guest lectures" that do Absolutely Nothing. You don't get a skill-up, you don't get a trait, you don't get an object, you get NOTHING. Other than for the aspiration, there is literally no reason to ever go there, ever. And think of the lost opportunity in not being allowed to invite a stay over guest to be a roommate instead of joining the household??? And the teenagers "running away to a party" with 0 impact on anything??? Sims 4 has an amazing diversity of things to do, especially if you have all the expansions, but way too many of them are complete nothingburgers. Special shoutout to the lack of interrelation between expansions (the skills high school should teach but doesn't for no in-universe reason...), but really, this is an overall problem.

The aging mechanics. And I don't mean the part where you can age up any time even if you have auto-aging on (though I think that's wrong too). I mean the part where instead of giving you extra time to get ahead on the next life stage, all life stages before young adult (used to be before teen, then they introduced teen aspirations) turn into a race to Collect All The Shinies Before You No Longer Can. The Top-Notch traits, as rewarding as they feel, make large households completely unfun as the gameplay is fully eaten by trying to make sure all three of your triplets get all of them. Similarly for child aspirations: completing all of them gives you a ridiculous advantage for the rest of your life, and they are not mutually exclusive, and you get just enough time in the standard lifespan to complete all of them. Oh, there are other fun child mechanics? Voidcritter battles? Festival of Youth? Sorry, no time for that, too busy trying to get a high score on the typing simulator.

Overall, this is a problem with the aspiration system. You can pursue any amount of them at the same time by switching around as you go about your life, and there's no reason to ever stop. In Sims 2 once a sim completed their lifelong aspiration they were happy for the rest of their life and you'd only need to stay on top of their needs. Which would mean you can have them have kids and focus on those kids, leaving adults to the background. (I don't remember Sims 3 well because it slowed my PC down to a crawl, so while I have happy memories, I don't think I explored it anywhere near as thoroughly) In Sims 4 you can play a single sim until you're thoroughly sick of the game (which isn't helped by the other points on this list) and there's never a reasonable ending point, because instead of transitioning into a graceful endgame state, aspirations just incentivize playing the same sim more and more to make optimal use of their rewards. The optimal way to play is to make your sim a jack of every single trade they ever touch at once. They want to read a book? Quick, switch to the Renaissance Sim aspiration! The necessity to switch between aspirations to have actions register is especially awkward - you can't just live your life and ignore the bonuses you're accruing in the background, no you have to actively OPTIMIZE. (Special shoutout to the design of some aspirations, like the Sulani one not accounting for native people who were born there at all, but considering I think the whole system should be reworked, I won't go into that lol)

This is a minor complaint, but the traits system? Kind of sucks. They had it right when they started introducing also Lifestyles, Likes and whatever else. (Character values are also fun, but then they transition into traits on age up, which adds to the problem). Reward traits should not be lumped in with personality traits, and store-bought traits should not be lumped in with aspiration rewards and neither should be lumped in with age-up rewards. (Which I have a problem with, as I already said, but that's a different thing) Seeing the "the most interesting sim in the world" achievement pop up after buying up half the reward store is just sad, especially when they are the same traits all your other sims have, because "fast cleaner", "waterproof" and "storm chaser" are just practical. And the former two are not personality traits. They're superpowers. Make a separate superpower category and put things there, okay?

Back to family gameplay for another go (it was my favorite in earlier games so I'm super salty), a lack of interaction options. Toddlers can only play with each other if you have a (huge, expensive, extremely unwieldy without mods) dollhouse??? Infants can't interact with each other at all, even as they're already crawling??? Neither can play with random objects that aren't toys??? The toddler jungle gym doesn't allow communal play, every toddler for themselves??? This is just straight up half assed. Children can't play in a group unless you buy an object that enables it??? The family gameplay in sims 4 is absolutely pathetic. It was from the start, when they didn't even have toddlers, but even introducing toddlers AND infants didn't fix it. You can do an immense amount of things in Sims 4... as long as you're only playing adults.

Anyway, they should make a separate RPG gameplay mode, where the superpowered sims you have made can lightsaber fight, explore treacherous jungles, snoop through an abandoned laboratory and whatever else with an HP bar, attack options and whatnot. The game wants it. The game YEARNS for it. You can be a soldier as an at-home career, and all you do is train and yell at other people? There's an object specifically to train in martial arts, but it just gives you regular fitness? There are vampires and werewolves in this game! (And both are presented as dangerous, except I haven't seen a single werewolf ever do anything more than annoy me by making my sim "cower in fear" by transforming in a public place and then just kind of hanging out there)

Also, fix all the bugs and botched interactions. I tried to have my character schedule a birthday party for the next day at their parents' place, and you know what happened when the time came? Nothing. I traveled to their place, and still nothing. I had to cancel the party and make a new one without scheduling. This is so much bullshit.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Amazon illegally interferes with an historic UK warehouse election

I'm in to TARTU, ESTONIA! Overcoming the Enshittocene (Monday, May 8, 6PM, Prima Vista Literary Festival keynote, University of Tartu Library, Struwe 1). AI, copyright and creative workers' labor rights (May 10, 8AM: Science Fiction Research Association talk, Institute of Foreign Languages and Cultures building, Lossi 3, lobby). A talk for hackers on seizing the means of computation (May 10, 3PM, University of Tartu Delta Centre, Narva 18, room 1037).

Amazon is very good at everything it does, including being very bad at the things it doesn't want to do. Take signing up for Prime: nothing could be simpler. The company has built a greased slide from Prime-curiosity to Prime-confirmed that is the envy of every UX designer.

But unsubscribing from Prime? That's a fucking nightmare. Somehow the company that can easily figure out how to sign up for a service is totally baffled when it comes to making it just as easy to leave. Now, there's two possibilities here: either Amazon's UX competence is a kind of erratic freak tide that sweeps in at unpredictable intervals and hits these unbelievable high-water marks, or the company just doesn't want to let you leave.

To investigate this question, let's consider a parallel: Black Flag's Roach Motel. This is an icon of American design, a little brown cardboard box that is saturated in irresistibly delicious (to cockroaches, at least) pheromones. These powerful scents make it admirably easy for all the roaches in your home to locate your Roach Motel and enter it.

But the interior of the Roach Motel is also coated in a sticky glue. Once roaches enter the motel, their legs and bodies brush up against this glue and become hopeless mired in it. A roach can't leave – not without tearing off its own legs.

It's possible that Black Flag made a mistake here. Maybe they wanted to make it just as easy for a roach to leave as it is to enter. If that seems improbable to you, well, you're right. We don't even have to speculate, we can just refer to Black Flag's slogan for Roach Motel: "Roaches check in, but they don't check out."

It's intentional, and we know that because they told us so.

Back to Amazon and Prime. Was it some oversight that cause the company make it so marvelously painless to sign up for Prime, but such a titanic pain in the ass to leave? Again, no speculation is required, because Amazon's executives exchanged a mountain of internal memos in which this is identified as a deliberate strategy, by which they deliberately chose to trick people into signing up for Prime and then hid the means of leaving Prime. Prime is a Roach Motel: users check in, but they don't check out:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

When it benefits Amazon, they are obsessive – "relentless" (Bezos's original for the company) – about user friendliness. They value ease of use so highly that they even patented "one click checkout" – the incredibly obvious idea that a company that stores your shipping address and credit card could let you buy something with a single click:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click#Patent

But when it benefits Amazon to place obstacles in our way, they are even more relentless in inventing new forms of fuckery, spiteful little landmines they strew in our path. Just look at how Amazon deals with unionization efforts in its warehouses.

Amazon's relentless union-busting spans a wide diversity of tactics. On the one hand, they cook up media narratives to smear organizers, invoking racist dog-whistles to discredit workers who want a better deal:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/02/amazon-chris-smalls-smart-articulate-leaked-memo

On the other hand, they collude with federal agencies to make workers afraid that their secret ballots will be visible to their bosses, exposing them to retaliation:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/amazon-violated-labor-law-alabama-union-election-labor-official-finds-rcna1582

They hold Cultural Revolution-style forced indoctrination meetings where they illegally threaten workers with punishment for voting in favor of their union:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/31/business/economy/amazon-union-staten-island-nlrb.html

And they fire Amazon tech workers who express solidarity with warehouse workers:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-fires-tech-employees-workers-criticism-warehouse-climate-policies/

But all this is high-touch, labor-intensive fuckery. Amazon, as we know, loves automation, and so it automates much of its union-busting: for example, it created an employee chat app that refused to deliver any message containing words like "fairness" or "grievance":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/05/doubleplusrelentless/#quackspeak

Amazon also invents implausible corporate fictions that allow it to terminate entire sections of its workforce for trying to unionize, by maintaining the tormented pretense that these workers, who wear Amazon uniforms, drive Amazon trucks, deliver Amazon packages, and are tracked by Amazon down to the movements of their eyeballs, are, in fact, not Amazon employees:

https://www.wired.com/story/his-drivers-unionized-then-amazon-tried-to-terminate-his-contract/

These workers have plenty of cause to want to unionize. Amazon warehouses are sources of grueling torment. Take "megacycling," a ten-hour shift that runs from 1:20AM to 11:50AM that workers are plunged into without warning or the right to refuse. This isn't just a night shift – it's a night shift that makes it impossible to care for your children or maintain any kind of normal life.

Then there's Jeff Bezos's war on his workers' kidneys. Amazon warehouse workers and drivers notoriously have to pee in bottles, because they are monitored by algorithms that dock their pay for taking bathroom breaks. The road to Amazon's warehouse in Coventry, England is littered with sealed bottles of driver piss, defenestrated by drivers before they reach the depot inspection site.

There's so much piss on the side of the Coventry road that the prankster Oobah Butler was able to collect it, decant it into bottles, and market it on Amazon as an energy beverage called "Bitter Lemon Release Energy," where it briefly became Amazon's bestselling energy drink:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/20/release-energy/#the-bitterest-lemon

(Butler promises that he didn't actually ship any bottled piss to people who weren't in on the gag – but let's just pause here and note how weird it is that a guy who hates our kidneys as much as Jeff Bezos built and flies a penis-shaped rocket.)

Butler also secretly joined the surge of 1,000 workers that Amazon hired for the Coventry warehouse in advance of a union vote, with the hope of diluting the yes side of that vote and forestall the union. Amazon displayed more of its famously selective competence here, spotting Butler and firing him in short order, while totally failing to notice that he was marketing bottles of driver piss as a bitter lemon drink on Amazon's retail platform.

After a long fight, Amazon's Coventry workers are finally getting their union vote, thanks to the GMB union's hard fought battle at the Central Arbitration Committee:

https://www.foxglove.org.uk/2024/04/26/amazon-warehouse-workers-in-coventry-will-vote-on-trade-union-recognition/

And right on schedule, Amazon has once again discovered its incredible facility for ease-of-use. The company has blanketed its shop floor with radioactively illegal "one click to quit the union" QR codes. When a worker aims their phones at the code and clicks the link, the system auto-generates a letter resigning the worker from their union.

As noted, this is totally illegal. English law bans employers from "making an offer to an employee for the sole or main purpose of inducing workers not to be members of an independent trade union, take part in its activities, or make use of its services."

Now, legal or not, this may strike you as a benign intervention on Amazon's part. Why shouldn't it be easy for workers to choose how they are represented in their workplaces? But the one-click system is only half of Amazon's illegal union-busting: the other half is delivered by its managers, who have cornered workers on the shop floor and ordered them to quit their union, threatening them with workplace retaliation if they don't.

This is in addition to more forced "captive audience" meetings where workers are bombarded with lies about what life in an union shop is like.

Again, the contrast couldn't be more stark. If you want to quit a union, Amazon makes this as easy as joining Prime. But if you want to join a union, Amazon makes that even harder than quitting Prime. Amazon has the same attitude to its workers and its customers: they see us all as a resource to be extracted, and have no qualms about tricking or even intimidating us into doing what's best for Amazon, at the expense of our own interests.

The campaigning law-firm Foxglove is representing five of Amazon's Coventry workers. They're doing the lord's work:

https://www.foxglove.org.uk/2024/05/02/legal-challenge-to-amazon-uks-new-one-click-to-quit-the-union-tool/

All this highlights the increasing divergence between the UK and the US when it comes to labor rights. Under the Biden Administration, @NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo has promulgated a rule that grants a union automatic recognition if the boss does anything to interfere with a union election:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/06/goons-ginks-and-company-finks/#if-blood-be-the-price-of-your-cursed-wealth

In other words, if Amazon tries these tactics in the USA now, their union will be immediately recognized. Abruzzo has installed an ultra-sensitive tilt-sensor in America's union elections, and if Bezos or his class allies so much as sneeze in the direction of their workers' democratic rights, they automatically lose.

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/2024/05/06/one-click-to-quit-the-union/#foxglove

Image: Isabela.Zanella (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ballot-box-2.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[sunderwight]

SV fic where Shen Yuan's status as a body-snatching entity is revealed before the Immortal Alliance Conference can happen.

Maybe the system suffers a glitch while some unforeseen side quest is active, and suddenly Shen Yuan's status is revealed and some of the other peak lords he's with seize the opportunity to exorcise his spirit and put Shen Jiu back in his place.

Shen Yuan has mixed feelings about this development, needless to say. On the one hand, it's kind of not actually that bad? He got caught out like a week away from the IAC and the necessary Abyss plotline, so at least like this, he's managed to give Luo Binghe a slightly better time on Qing Jing for the past few years and equip him more capably to survive the Abyss, but he also doesn't have to personally throw him down there. That's the silver lining.

On the other hand, everything else about this situation sucks! He got attached to his life as Shen Qingqiu, dammit! And now he's been revealed and branded as some kind of horrible demonic spirit thing, and he was rather painfully expelled (even though he wasn't even there willingly in the first place), and so he's been reduced to some a kind of sparkly ghost light hovering on the fringes of existence, highly susceptible to being harmed if any more righteous cultivators get it in their heads to disperse him!

Which is better than just being catapulted back into his rotting corpse in the other world, but not by as big of a margin as he'd like.

Basically, in terms of his ability to influence the world Shen Yuan has been downgraded back to "read only" status. He finds that he can manifest himself in places that he's already been, or around people he has a particular affinity towards, but they can't perceive him and he can't communicate or even do much more than some minor poltergeist type activity. Which he is cautious about anyway, because if he gets caught around Shen Jiu, Shen Jiu is going to disperse him with extra prejudice.

Unfortunately, nearly everything Shen Yuan cares about is in Shen Jiu's orbit.

So he can only watch, metaphorically gritting his teeth as the newly-restored Shen Qingqiu kicks Luo Binghe out of the bamboo house, burns all the bridges that Shen Yuan painstakingly rebuilt for him, refuses point blank to let Liu Qingge help with Without-a-Cure, resumes and even begins taking more frequent trips to the nearest brothels, and neglects his duties to turn into a paranoid wreck as if he half-expects Shen Yuan to steal his body back from him the next time he lets his guard down. Corporal punishment spikes back up on Qing Jing Peak.

Shen Yuan is surprised to hear the whispers of dissent, even so. A spirit possessing a righteous cultivator is a pretty damning incident, and there's no way that he could come out of it smelling like roses. And yet, even though his -- Shen Qingqiu's disciples know enough to be circumspect about saying anything of the sort, there are still murmurs and rumblings about how things used to run, not too long ago.

Ming Fan quiets any such talk as soon as he hears it. Ning Yingying scarcely seems to know how to respond to the situation, except to sometimes plaintively insist that she hadn't even noticed much change between Shen Qingqiu's at all. But Luo Binghe...

Well.

Whenever there are mutterings, it often seems as though Binghe is there. Nodding. Whispering. Carefully putting forth suggestions that others barely seem to recognize as suggestions. Shen Yuan only notices because he knows what Binghe's capable of when he decides to be manipulative, and even he finds himself wondering if it's not just a coincidence, something he's imagining, because Luo Binghe hasn't even blackened through his Abyss arc yet.

Even so, there he is, musing carefully on how strange it was that he's heard that Hong Jing hadn't identified any untoward presence in Shen Qingqiu before, how Shizun had never done anything bad to the peak despite all the claims that he'd supposedly been possessed by a malicious entity for years, and wasn't this new Shen Qingqiu acting much more suspicious? Much more malicious? Isn't is the new Shizun who jumps at shadows and talks to people who aren't there, and seems so uneasy in his own skin?

If one had to guess which version was an unstable monster possessing a human's body, and which was the righteous and noble peak lord... ah, well. It's just surprising, isn't it? Luo Binghe would of course never suggest that this new Shen Qingqiu was in actuality the being that had stolen someone else's place. He's surely never second guess the judgment of the peak lords, who claim to have let an interloper among them for YEARS in total ignorance. It's just something to think about.

Alas for Binghe, though a lot of the peak seems inclined to agree with him, he can't win over enough to inspire anything worse than discontent. The "new" Shen Qingqiu does behave a lot more like the one that most of the Qing Jing knew prior to his qi deviation, after all, and it's no mystery why Luo Binghe -- spurned former favorite, now back to being at the bottom of the pecking order -- would be unhappy with the change. Shen Yuan appreciates that this is at least doing a good job of setting up Luo Binghe's altered opinion on his shizun, and he's touched that he made a good enough impression for Binghe to be mad about the sudden regression, but he wishes he could tell Binghe that there's simply nothing to be done about it. That is the real Shen Qingqiu, and Binghe ought to concern himself more with the upcoming conference!

At least, despite being kicked out of the bamboo house, Luo Binghe managed to farm enough good opinion with some of the other disciples during his tenure as Favorite that he doesn't go back to sleeping in the woodshed. Without Shen Qingqiu expressly demanding it, no one would dare, just in case Luo Binghe might regain his status one day. There seems to be an awareness that "evil" Shizun would have made them run laps, but "good" Shizun would now probably whip them half to death in a fit of temper. No one wants to take chances.

Finally, the Immortal Alliance Conference rolls around. Shen Yuan can only watch and cheer Binghe on as best as he's able to, even knowing the probable outcome. And Binghe does so well! He fights bravely but also smartly. When Shen Qingqiu arrives, Binghe doesn't lose an ounce of his caution, though he does still nobly defend his master even though the good feelings between them have dried up. He correctly identifies Without-a-Cure's flare up and silently helps compensate for Shen Jiu's weakness, and sticks by him even though the Original Goods is hardly appreciative.

When the Abyss opens up, and Luo Binghe's demonic seal is broken, Shen Qingqiu seems almost relieved to have this information brought to light. He accuses Luo Binghe not only of orchestrating the invasion of demons at the conference, but of arranging fro Shen Jiu to be replaced too.

"Of course, for a demon like you, summoning some wicked force into this master's body would be easy!" he spits.

Luo Binghe looks bowled over by the accusation. But rather than defending himself, he latches onto it as if it might be some kind of lifeline.

"For a demon like this one... it would be possible?" he echoes.

Shen Jiu hurls more accusations. Of course it is. Luo Binghe is not just any demon, but the most powerful, dangerous, and destructive sort there is. Little is beyond the scope of a Heavenly Demon's power, or wretchedness. Luo Binghe must have uncovered his heritage and seen a convenient means of ridding himself of an inconvenient master. Wherever that horrid spirit is now, it's probably just waiting for the next chance to leap back in at Luo Binghe's call!

"Shizun's spirit... that spirit from before, it still exists?" Luo Binghe catches.

"As if you don't know. Beast. Even the sect leader could not destroy your minion completely," Shen Jiu sneers.

"And it would be within my abilities to put it back in your body. Instead of you."

"You won't get the chance."

Shen Jiu stabs Luo Binghe before throwing him into the Abyss. Binghe fights back, but he seems reluctant to injure his shizun, even now.

Shen Yuan supposes that such reluctance won't survive the Abyss. Still, it's emotional for him. That such a little kindness could cause Luo Binghe to hesitate, even at this point, it really speaks to the resilience of hope in Binghe's heart.

Shen Yuan's little ghost light almost follows him down. But the Abyss would be too dangerous for him, even as he is now. He'd be a little mote of spiritual energy, easily gobbled up by any number of creatures in that place, if he wasn't just swept up by the chaotic ambient energies themselves. So he can only stay behind and think some very colorful swear words in Shen Jiu's general direction, until the rift closes and leaves no trace of Luo Binghe behind, except for the shards of Zheng Yang.

The shards are left behind. Shen Yuan finds that he has a little bit of spiritual storage space. Just enough to maybe fit all of them, so he goes and painstakingly uses his limited powers to lift up each piece and drop it in. It takes him hours and hours, but luckily the clean-up of the whole disaster is something that will take months. No one seems inclined to go reclaim Luo Binghe's shattered blade or risk getting too close to the remnants of the rift, even closed. So, Shen Yuan manages.

The next few years prove difficult. Shen Yuan finds that it's hard to retain his presence in the world. His little spirit has dampened considerably, and few things seem to perk him back up. He has more troubles following anyone who isn't Shen Jiu now that Binghe is in the Abyss, and Shen Jiu is depressing as hell to spend time around. He's rotten with kids, sucks at teaching, he has no friends, his health is deteriorating, and Shen Yuan has no interest in seeing what he gets up to in the brothels.

But Binghe is definitely coming back, and Shen Yuan wants to see him again.

His patience is rewarded the first time he finds his consciousness drifting, only to snap back to awareness in a place that's not Qing Jing Peak. He instead finds that he's in an unfamiliar patch of wilderness along a river, watching as Luo Binghe fights a small pack of demonic beasts.

It's definitely not the Endless Abyss. Has it been five years already...? Shen Yuan hadn't thought so, but then again, he's not the best at keeping track of time in this state.

Luo Binghe defeats the beasts, but they land more hits and wound him worse than Shen Yuan would have anticipated. The wounds aren't healing as quick as they should either. Was Binghe poisoned? Or is this a remnant of Shen Yuan's own poor teaching, the clumsiness in sword practice he never totally managed to correct leading somehow to this?

He gets it when Qin Wanyue and several other Huan Hua cultivators show up, however, and Luo Binghe manages to play the righteous cultivator who just survived a harrowing battle role to the hilt. It takes him very little effort to get the Huan Hua disciples to take him back with them and help "patch him up", and soon enough Shen Yuan has front row seats to watch as Binghe ingratiates himself with the sect.

Mostly, Shen Yuan is just relieved to confirm that Binghe did indeed survive, and glad that he's out of the horrible Abyss and in a place where he can rest and eat decent meals and be fawned over by his well-deserved admirers. Though Luo Binghe seems colder even than Shen Yuan expected, especially in some places where a bit of charm would serve him better. He declines outright to address the Palace Master as "shizun", even though he accepts the offer to stay as a guest disciple at Huan Hua Palace, and he is abrupt and aloof towards both Qin Wanyue and the Little Palace Mistress, despite their obvious interest in him.

Binghe doesn't seem to sleep as soundly as he should either. At night he often brings out a dream stone, which Shen Yuan recognizes as an amplification tool from the novel, but it seems that whatever Binghe is trying to search for with it is beyond his reach. Sometimes Shen Yuan imagines he can hear his disciple's voice calling Shizun at night. But always, Binghe is asleep, and there's no one in Huan Hua Palace he has deigned to address like that anyway. It's a trick of his own imagination, missing the days when Luo Binghe could call out and he himself could answer.

Things go mostly according to the plot, with a few disruptions here and there. Luo Binghe seems to be lagging behind on the romantic subplots, but rushing ahead on the vendetta against his old teacher. The Trial of Shen Qingqiu takes place at Jinlan City, with demon instigators who work for Luo Binghe accusing the peak lord of colluding with demons and setting him up to seem like he was involved in the sower attack. Shen Yuan knows, from watching Binghe, that the sower thing was mostly taking advantage of an existing situation to frame Shen Qingqiu. Binghe himself didn't have anything to do with Jinlan's suffering, but is obviously not above using it to his advantage.

Combined with Qiu Haitang's testimony, Shen Qingqiu is arrested and locked up where Luo Binghe can torture and dismember him at will.

However, Binghe... doesn't do that?

Instead he swiftly relocates Shen Qingqiu to a prison in the demon realms, and seems to abandon his concerns with Huan Hua Palace and the righteous cultivation sects altogether. He just leaves them to fight it out amongst themselves, as if he's got no concern with who comes out on top, and in the meanwhile he keeps Shen Qingqiu locked up but surprisingly well-treated?

Despite Shen Qingqiu's obvious terror and vitriol towards him, Luo Binghe forces him to eat nutritious meals, and attends to his health problems, and makes no move to injure him at all. He has nothing good to say to Shen Jiu, but he doesn't hurt him. Yet there is something distinctly weird about the whole dynamic, not at all like someone who has decided to keep a prisoner under ethical conditions for moral reasons or something like that.

Shen Yuan's not sure what to make of it.

In the end, Shen Jiu himself illuminates the situation.

It happens after Shen Jiu has rejected food. Luo Binghe tuts and asks if Shen Jiu suspects it would be poisoned. Shen Jiu sneers at him.

"I know it isn't," he says. "You wouldn't poison this body. I know what you're after."

"Oh? Wise Master Shen figured out this much?" Binghe replies, dry as the fucking desert.

"You're keeping me in this condition because you want to put that thing back in my body!" Shen Jiu accuses.

It takes Shen Yuan a moment to realize that Shen Jiu is referring to him. That he thinks Luo Binghe is keeping him fit and healthy for Shen Yuan's sake.

Wouldn't that be going too far just for some old teacher who was nice?! Yes, he knows that he made an impact on Luo Binghe, but it wasn't hard! Shen Jiu set the bar at the earth's crust, clearing it hardly required the kind of effort or devotion that would inspire an entire elaborate scheme purely on Shen Yuan's behalf!

He can't believe it.

But, Binghe doesn't deny it.

In fact he smiles, his expression somehow conveying that Shen Jiu guessed perfectly correct, but also that there's no good it can do him. Binghe has never looked so much like a piece of PIDW fanart before, with some dark and potent rage simmering just beneath the veneer of his placid smile.

"Shizun should not be referred to so impolitely," Luo Binghe counters. "If anyone in this room is a thing, it is this usurper in front of me."

"Usurper?! In my own body? You're mad."

Binghe tuts.

Master Shen should understand that his claim is contested. After all, if one woman gives birth to a child but then casts it into a river to die, but another fishes the babe out and cradles it to her breast -- which woman deserves to be called that child's mother? Just because Shen Jiu was born into that body, doesn't mean he deserves it more than anyone else.

But even if he did, Luo Binghe wouldn't care. He would kill to get his Shizun back. This isn't really so different from that, is it? And there is no love lost between him and Shen Jiu to make him hesitate. If his Shizun disagrees, he may disciple Binghe as he sees fit once he returns.

Shen Jiu points out that Luo Binghe's machinations have ruined his reputation. Even if he gets that creature to possess his body again, there's no way that they could infiltrate Cang Qiong Sect a second time.

But Binghe waves off his concerns. He clearly has thought of this, and has plans for it, but is also not about to be stupid enough to monologue any more at Shen Jiu. Once he leaves, Shen Yuan lingers for a little while, and notices that Shen Jiu actually seems genuinely concerned about what might happen to the sect if Luo Binghe succeeds and gets Shen Yuan put back on Qing Jing Peak.

Of course, Shen Yuan knows he wouldn't actually do anything to harm Cang Qiong, but Shen Jiu doesn't. This is the first time Shen Yuan has seen him actually reveal shades of what might be called a noble impulse.

It's not much, but... sigh.

The thing is, Shen Yuan doesn't really want to steal anybody's body! No one consulted with him the first time it happened! And they sure aren't consulting with him now, either, although to be fair they can't. But he might just have enough ability as a little ghost light to stave off some of this whole process, and he's got to decide if he wants to try. Or if he'll let Binghe have his way, and succeed in pushing Shen Jiu back out and giving Shen Yuan his life again.

Because Binghe will definitely succeed if he really does try. That's how the world works.

And if he did... that might be the only way for Shen Yuan to get his life as Shen Qingqiu back. Which he does want, desperately! He misses it. He misses it both in the general sense of having a body at all, but also in the particular sense of all the things he managed to attain as Qing Jing Peak Lord. As Shen Qingqiu.

Shen Jiu, also, makes a very tempting sacrifice in all this. Shen Yuan frankly hates his guts. Maybe it could have been different, but the fact that Shen Yuan worked so hard to try and make that life better, only for Shen Jiu to just go right back to being an intractable asshole who, frankly, should never be in charge of children ever, rankles! He went right back to mistreating Luo Binghe as well, and threw him into the Abyss, and if Binghe's plan was to violently kill him again as revenge for that then Shen Yuan wouldn't fault him. He didn't fault him the first time. He wasn't going to fault him even when it seemed like he would be the one Binghe was destined to rip apart in justified vengeance.

This is different, though. Shen Yuan wants to fight for the life he longs to be living, especially now when the axe of the Abyss is no longer hanging over him.

But is he willing to actually become the thing everyone else decided he was in order to get it? A body-snatching, malicious spirit?

Shen Jiu is horribly unsuited to his life as Shen Qingqiu. But, it is still his life. Shen Yuan really just managed to borrow it for a while.

Deep down he knows that, even if he would like to ignore it.

So when Binghe finally sets up the ceremony, and Shen Yuan's soul is called back into Shen Qingqiu's body, he hesitates. Shen Jiu is poised like a snarling, wounded animal within the confines of his own body. Even the gentlest tap would knock him back out again. Shen Yuan gets the sense that the system is also there, just waiting and even eager for him to do it. Take back the body, resume whatever quests or directives are waiting for him there.

Shen Yuan, even as fragile as his own spirit is, could crush Shen Jiu's battered soul to dust.

Instead he withdraws.

Binghe tries the ritual again, and again, and each time Shen Yuan feels stronger. But it doesn't matter, because he doesn't want to be an evil body-stealing parasite! He wishes he could just tell Binghe to stop wasting valuable resources on this, especially when Binghe could be focusing on other, more important things! Like building up happy relationships or consolidating his rule of the demon realms or establishing an actual strong foothold in the human world, or something!

Somehow, Shen Jiu figures this out before Luo Binghe does. Of course, he conveys the information in the worst way possible, snidely wondering what Luo Binghe did to alienate "that creature" he's trying so hard to resurrect so badly that it will refuse even the open, glowing invitation he keeps writing for it!

Excuse you, you miserable old man, Shen Yuan isn't avoiding Binghe! He is facing a very difficult moral dilemma and handling it LIKE A CHAMP! Fuck you!

Unfortunately, even though Shen Jiu has decided that Luo Binghe and Shen Yuan were in cahoots about the first body snatch, Luo Binghe knows that they weren't. He also doesn't know that his old Shizun knew full well that he was a Heavenly Demon the whole time. So now he has a lot of doubts to wrestle with, especially give that, despite the consensus of the rest of the world, Luo Binghe is not convinced that Shen Yuan actually is some kind of demonic spirit.

Maybe he's a good spirit that has rejected Binghe for his wretched blood?

But Shizun always said that things like that didn't matter!

So... maybe it's not his blood. Maybe Binghe's actions are what has caused Shizun to forsake him. All the terrible things he did to survive the Abyss, and the machinations afterwards, framing Shen Qingqiu and imprisoning him, setting himself up as a demonic ruler... all of that.

Binghe entreats his Shizun to forgive him. Or even if he won't forgive him, to still come back. Binghe will... stay away, if that's what Shizun wants. Just so long as Shizun is alive, is somewhere in the world, safe and happy, then... then...

He can't quite get through lying to claim that it would be enough. But it would be better than the current situation, so he tries.

Shen Yuan, luckily, has been juiced up enough from all the failed summoning rituals that later that night, he finally recognizes the little whisper-calls as echoes of Luo Binghe's dreams. And he's strong enough to follow the invitations! He goes to visit Binghe in his dreams, and reassures him that he's not trying to reject him at all. He's very proud of Binghe, and wants him to be happy and successful. Binghe could rule the world and Shizun would just cheer him on!

It's just that Shen Yuan never willingly possessed Shen Qingqiu in the first place. He misses his life, but given the choice, he doesn't want to be that kind of entity.

So, new plan -- if Shen Yuan won't take a body off of an undeserving asshole, then Binghe will make him a new body! Luckily, Shen Yuan knows a way to grow one. They "borrow" some genetic materials from Shen Jiu to aid the process, and then Luo Binghe, surprisingly indifferent about the whole thing, cuts Shen Jiu loose at the border.

Shen Yuan is surprised. Binghe really doesn't care about that? Turns out no, not so much. Shen Jiu is awful, but he's nothing to Binghe in the long run. (Also it's a long shot but if nothing else does work Binghe might have to force Shen Yuan to take Shen Qingqiu's body back, though of course he's not about to say so, and anyway Shen Jiu is still going to have a hell of a time waiting for him back in the cultivation world. Luo Binghe wishes him luck and every pleasure of trying to clear his ruined name, living a life on the lamb with an insidious poison constantly eating away at him, or the full enjoyment of a second visit to the water prison, whichever ends up happening.)

With the help of Luo Binghe's blood parasites, the Sun and Moon Dew whatever mushroom body grows in record time. A summoning ritual isn't even required, Shen Yuan just scoots right in as soon as the body is ready and blinks his eyes open to see his anxious disciple's face peering back at him.

Happily ever after!

[mysumeow]

ᯓ★ KINKTOBER DAY 1: SEMI-PUBLIC

ᓚᘏᗢ WARNINGS: Afab body reader, referred to with you/your. Established relationship, handjob, doing it in a semi-public place, reader takes a dominant role for the most part of the smut. Not proofread.

ᓚᘏᗢ SUMMARY: You sneak in with Kinich into the changing room.

ᓚᘏᗢ A/N: First kinktober post! I almost caved in and posted it before it was october but I held on since I wanted to actually participate for the first time TT_TT

🎃 . . . KINKTOBER MASTERLIST

There was just something about Kinich today that made your thoughts swirl with improper ideas, and thus, the moment he excused himself to change from his usual clothes into swimming trunks, you knew it was a window of opportunity to sneak in with him into the changing room.

You looked around to make sure there was no one in sight before you called his name. Kinich identified your voice, and he proceeded to open the door.

“What—”

With a solid push, you cut him off and stepped inside with him.

His skin was warm, and it was nice against yours. You pressed your face against his bare chest, as you’d caught him mid-undressing. After a few seconds of both surprise and confusion, your boyfriend wrapped his arms around your waist.

“I was going to ask what you were doing here, but I have an idea of what it could be.”

“Why do you think I’m here?” you pulled away and feigned innocence.

“Sneaking with your partner into a secluded area doesn’t always come with pure intentions.”

“Says who? I only came here to see you,” you were aware it was a brittle excuse and that he knew you were toying with him. Kinich sighed, used to your playful antics at this point.

“Do as you please.”

Next thing he knew, he was pushed against the wall, facing it. You snuck a hand under his pants and got to work him. It was a matter of time until you felt his dick harden beneath your touches, your free hand toying with one of his nipples. Besides that, the way you kissed his shoulder blades further aided to that result.

“Already hard? That was fast. You must like me a lot,” you couldn’t help but tease him, smiling satisfied at yourself.

“When you’re touching me all over my weak spots, how could I not get like this?” Kinich rebutted with a shaky breath; his arms trembled as well.

How unfortunate you couldn’t see the way his precum beaded at the tip or watch him furrow his eyebrows from the pleasure. You acted in an impulsive manner; you didn’t give it too much thought in what position you wanted to pleasure him. Nevertheless, the sounds he was making were arousing, and you continued with your pursuit of his climax. You slid your thumb over the head to smear it on his cock, the friction became more fluid. 

“Haah… It’s not enough,” Kinich murmured. His hand seized your wrist and attempted to fasten your rhythm.

It was your intention to go slow, so you swatted his hand away. “I want to call the shots today, okay? You can have your fun later.”

“I’ll remember this when it’s my turn.”

“I’m scared,” you said with a giggle.

The fact that he was still able to get hard despite the dryness, you decided to tone down a little your unfair treatment. The hand that was working his member went to his mouth, and you asked him to spit on it.

“What bit you this morning?” he was near speechless, not accustomed to being on the receiving end of these types of shameful requests. It was usual for it to be the other way around, when he wanted to finger you, and he told you to get his fingers wet with your tongue. However, he did as you asked, finding no harm in humoring you.

Now with your hand wet, you resumed your strokes. Heeding his request to go faster, though. You increased the tempo enough to lead him closer to his climax, but not quite, to tether him on the edge.

Kinch bit his lip, trying to hinder his groans. All you were doing was giving him a handjob, and yet, it grew more difficult to control himself.

“Kinich!” Mualani’s voice sounded from the outside. “Are you in there?”

“Yes. What’s the matter?” Kinich answered with utmost effort to not let out any suspicious noises.

“You’ve been gone for a while now. I was worried. Everything alright?”

Kinich parted his bitten lips to answer, but a hitched groan escaped instead. You’d decided to really speed up.

“Yes, I’m okay. I’ll be there—” he leaned his head against the wall to steady himself. A hand shot to yours, and for a second you thought he wanted you to wait a moment, but he didn’t put any force in his grasp. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

“Okay, then! Don’t take too long. The celebration’s about to start.”

Before you were given the chance to slow down, Kinich maintained his hold around your hand and proceeded to guide it at a steady tempo now, his orgasm built in the matter of a blink of an eye. He shifted his hips forward, your hand flush against the base when he came.

Shortly after, his hand went limp as he relished in the waves of pleasure that coursed through him, trying to regain his breath.

“Head back before it gets too suspicious,” Kinich spoke once he recovered. “I’ll meet you there.”

“Alright,” you gave him a peck on his cheek.

The party continued in complete normalcy; the festive atmosphere helped with everyone being distracted. You had so much fun with your friends and Kinich. It was a rather nice night.

When the party ended and everyone was heading back home, and it was your turn to change clothes... Little did you know of who was waiting there for you to payback what you did to him earlier.

“You know very well how I operate. Everything comes at a price,” Kinich whispered against your ear, a hand already parting your legs and rubbing at your clit through the fabric of your swimwear. “You had your fun. It’s my turn now.”

[nicxl333]

LUSTFUL TENDENCIES— WRIOTHESLEY X READER

bro…i just finished the 4.1 archon quest and omfg i’m going mad over wrio- fucking hell

characters: wriothesley, afab! reader

summary: you almost get caught giving wriothesley a blowjob so he punishes you in his office (not proof-read)

warnings: 18+ content, nsfw, semi-public smut, blowjob, handcuffs, spanking, established relationship, orgasm denial, unprotected sex, squirting, breeding, slight 4.1 spoilers

it wasn’t supposed to end up this way. hell, you had only made your way into the fortress of meropide to deliver an urgent message from neuvillete to none other than the duke himself, your boyfriend.

so how oh how did you end up with a mouth stuffed full of dick?

“fuck…that’s it beautiful, doing so— so well for me” wriothesley groaned, pushing his bangs back from his face.

you moaned around his dick in appreciation and gratitude at his praise, your cunt pulsing at the sheer sinfulness of the situation. you knew damn well that anyone could see what was going on should they venture even one step too far up the staircase leading to the open plan of his office. truth be told they wouldn’t even have to set foot on the stairs, for they would hear the sloppy sounds of your mouth long beforehand.

your eyes gazed into his, enjoying how he fell apart at the sight of your mouth engulfing every inch of him. the way his eyes clenched shut, scar just below his right eye compressing as it followed the movements of his eyes squeezing from the overwhelming pleasure.

he could feel the coil in his stomach tightening, his resolve unravelling as he tried to regain his composure and control, albeit failing to find any reason to given how you were taking care of him so fucking well.

alas, before his end could occur, the sound of his heavy door opening downstairs and footsteps audible caused both parties to freeze, the risk of your filthy secret threatening to be discovered.

proving his ability to act instantaneously under pressure he lifted you off his soaked cock, pushing you under his desk and reeling in his chair so his state of undress would not be identified should whoever was quickly approaching wander too close to his grand desk.

after a continuous rhythm of steps, a head poked through, the figure confirmed to be chef wolsey.

wriothesley briefly glanced down at you, his eyes sharp in a silent warning;

stay. silent.

you spared him a single smirk just before he lifted his head to look at the man who was now standing before him.

“how can i help you today wolsey? if it’s for time off you already know the drill, you need to give in credit coupons.”

above your head you could hear the chef speak.

“ah, your grace, it’s not about that. if you are lenient enough i would need your authorisation on a slight change to the ingredients of the welfare meals. i have discovered a correlation of stomach bugs occurring with numerous inmates possibly due to the type of milk used.”

really and truly, you couldn’t give a shit on the status of the inmates, as cruel as it sounded. you just wanted to be filled by wriothesley, and wolsey was currently cockblocking you. so you did the one thing that was advised against.

“i suppose that can be done, given that it’ll lessen my work load should i allow this matter to be resolved. just give me the required paperwork and i can give you clearan—”

he immediately tensed up, seizing in the middle of his sentence. why? because he felt your hand slowly stroking his girth. although taken by surprise, he did his best to not show it, opting to clear his throat in an attempt to save himself.

“umm, sir, are you alright?”

your hand tightened on wriothesley’s dick, twisting as you stroked, your smirk widening with your wicked intentions. you could see his thighs taut and fists clenched, trying so hard to not react. he couldn’t talk, he knew if he opened his mouth to speak he would either let out a groan or moan. whatever the outcome, both were highly unsavoury and would no doubt get you caught. after a few moments of silence wolsey pressed further.

“erm…your grace?”

you slightly loosened your grip and slowed down your movements to allow the man in front of you to save his dignity, if he even had any left.

he lifted a bandaged hand, waving it around in a dismissive motion. “yes yes, i’m quite alright. don’t you have ingredients to be chopping or something? best get to it.”

wolsey immediately nodded, turning towards the stairs and swiftly making his way down. only when wriothesley was certain he was gone did he push you off him and pushed his chair back, pulling you upwards and slamming you on his desk.

“oh you are so fucked baby. did you enjoy us almost getting caught?”

he leaned over you, caging you in while he started rubbing your clit through your panties, eliciting a moan from you.

“yeah i know you enjoyed that, you’re fucking soaked you dirty girl. want me to fuck you?”

he pressed harder on your clit, rendering you unable to speak. you arched your back and rolled your hips in time with wriothesley’s hand, maximising the pleasure. when he didn’t hear an answer however he took it upon himself to bring a hand down against your left cheek, the stinging sensation leaving you crying out at the pain mixed with pleasure.

“answer me y/n, do you want me to fuck you?”

“yes wrio please! it feels so good!” the strokes of his fingers increased in rapidness, the friction of the fabric against your clit quickly bringing you to the brink of orgasm.

“you gonna cum pretty girl?”

“shit— yes wrio!”

“well that’s too damn bad.” and he pulled away altogether, standing at full height and looking down at you.

you turned your head to look at him, eyes wide with the fear he would leave you like this, unsatisfied.

“wrio please! make me cum, i need you so bad baby!”

he stood, arms crossed and expression unwavering.

“oh you do now? maybe you should’ve thought about that before you pulled that little stunt of yours.”

you wiggled your ass at him hoping to break down his resolve.

“wrio i’m sorry, i’ll be good for you i swear.”

he said nothing, instead opting to move closer to stand right behind you, dick now pressing against your clit, making your breath hitch. you heard movements of metal behind you, wondering what he was doing until he leant closer over you, chest to your back which pressed his dick even further into you. you moaned out, too distracted to realise just what he was doing until he grabbed both your wrists, bringing them together and cuffing them with his handcuffs.

he stepped back to look at his handiwork, smirking as your arms flailed to the best of your ability, struggling to get free. he then bent down, kneeling while he pulled down your panties, looking at your cunt shining with arousal.

“wrio! what are you doing?!”

“you want to get fucked right? i’m just fulfilling your wish, with the exception of one thing of course: you can’t cum.”

you whined out, jolting when you felt extremely cold fingers against your entrance, tracing the seeping hole. it was apparent that he used the power from his cryo vision to lower the temperature of his palm.

“wrio! c’mon i said i was sorr-”

you cut yourself off when you felt two of his fingers breach your entrance, stuffing you to the hilt. his fingers were thick as it is, so you already felt extremely full. even worse when he curled them against that spongey spot in your cunt and started attacking it.

your thighs immediately tried to close, proving to be quite the useless action once his iron grip prevented you from doing so.

“aht, aht, if you know what’s good for you y/n you’ll comply like a good girl, you’re already in deep shit as it is.”

and so, you succumbed to the pleasure of the sensation you were feeling, moaning at wriothesley’s ministrations on your pussy. he leaned over you once more, this time feeling his bare dick directly on your bare clit. he licked the shell of your ear, whispering into it seconds later.

“yeah does that feel good y/n? go on, tell me how good i’m making you feel.”

“so fucking good wrio! i want more— want you to fuck me. don’t hold back, i can take it.”

he complied, removing his fingers and moving his dick down to your entrance, using your previous lubrication and current arousal to fully coat his angry red tip, before slowly pushing in.

your back arched hard into a ‘c’, your hands doing what they could to grip onto his desk despite being cuffed.

he laughed at your actions, continuing to sheath himself inside you until you were completely filled, resting for a moment before slowly pulling out again. he repeated this action multiple times, teasing you to see just how long it would be until you completely snapped.

“wrio! can you stop fucking around and jus— oh fuck!”

his change in pace was instantaneous, his thrusts pounding against your ass, having you moan out in ecstasy. he quickly pulled his tie from around his neck, putting it around yours and pulling so your head fell back, being able to see him above you and therefore his next words to you.

“be quiet baby, or i’ll stop.”

although his door downstairs was big and heavy, it wasn’t soundproof. and if you didn’t shut the fuck up someone was bound to hear.

you nodded your head, opting to let out whimpers of approval instead. he doubled his pace, something you didn’t even know was possible, almost as if he was challenging you to disobey him once more.

it was becoming increasingly difficult to not cum. his thrusts drove so deep inside you it felt like you couldn’t breathe in the short burst of intervals between thrusts. each push of his hips against yours had the veins on the underside of his dick rubbing up against your g-spot, something that quickly had you tumbling towards the edge. you knew wriothesley knew that, how could he not when all he could feel was your cunt gripping him so tightly?

it’s not like he was well off either, he was quickly losing himself inside you too. although you had been dating for a little over 7 months, he still could not find himself getting used to the way you clenched around him. it had him quickly unraveling the exact same way you did, and delving deep into the pits of no return.

“you gonna cum?” his voice was strained, composure tethering on a thin thread, threatening to collapse.

“n- no.” a lie. you both knew that. he decided to play along though.

“good. cause you can’t cum.”

“wrio!” you had no choice but to beg, for you were quite literally about to cum. his earlier actions had already brought you to the edge, but now you were delirious with pleasure, and had no way to stop yourself from cumming. you already did what you could. “please! let me cum, let me cum! i’m sorry baby i really am, i need you to make me cum! i’m begging you, just do something, anything!”

wriothesley had no other option but to allow you to, given that he was about to cum himself.

“go ahead y/n, make a mess for me.”

with his approval, you immediately felt the coil inside your stomach snap, causing you to gush around his cock. you moaned out his name as quiet as you could, which wasn’t very quiet at all. he never stopped thrusting, allowing your essence to go everywhere. on your thighs, on his, and dripping on the floor. your cunt was gripping wriothesley like a vice, and he fell victim to his own orgasm, hands on your hips tightening, groaning deeply while spilling every drop into your spent pussy. his thighs shook from the sheer intensity as he slowly came to a stop.

all was silent for a moment, as you both breathed heavily, hot and exhausted from what had just taken place. after a while, wriothesley was the first to move, slipping out of you and grabbing some tissues from the side of his desk, wiping delicately at your cunt before pulling up your panties and releasing your wrists from his cuffs with a key from his draw. he gave your temple a kiss before pulling away.

he then fixed himself up, tucking himself away back into his pants and taking his tie back from your neck, wiping the sweat from his forehead and sitting back in his chair, pulling you down with him and engulfing you in a hug.

“now then, would you like some tea before you go?”

[hisui-dreamer]

Hi, congratulations on 1k followers! I love your writing a lot and I was hoping you could do Villainess AUs with Malleus? Like isekai manhwa style? Thank you!!

the gazelle's sweet briar

Pairing: Malleus Draconia x f!reader

Synopsis: your first objective was to avoid the main characters, but it's not easy when you only have the memories of your friend's ramblings to work off of

Tags: cliché isekai plot, reincarnation, fluff, arranged marriage, tw (mentioned): bad parenting, patriarchal society, death

Word count: 1.6k+

Notes: @coralinnii has an amazing series based on isekai villainesses, so i definitely recommend you check out her work too! im so in love with it (⁠≧⁠▽⁠≦⁠)

Masterlist

Once upon a time, there lived a villainess of exceptional allure, her visage as enchanting as a moonlit night. However, this bewitching beauty concealed a heart blackened by a singular obsession with appearances.

From the earliest days of her upbringing, her mother, a woman who had managed to step into aristocracy by charming a noble, had instilled in her a cruel belief: that those who were not blessed with physical perfection were destined for lives of relentless mockery and eternal solitude. This twisted ideology consumed the villainess' every thought, blinding her to the virtues of education and morality. She became nothing more than a porcelain doll, admired solely for her aesthetic charm.

The King arranged a marriage between her and Duke Draconia, the enigmatic descendant of the dragons who ruled the northern lands, believing that such a striking bride would surely please the reclusive Duke.

However, the King remained oblivious to the swirling rumours that pervaded the courtly circles. Whispers spoke of the Duke as a hideous man who had never once revealed his face, perpetually concealed behind a forbidding black mask. When the rumours reached the villainess' ears, she threw tantrum after tantrum, vehemently refusing to wed a man whose appearance couldn't possibly match her own.

Yet, a royal decree could not be denied. Reluctantly, the villainess embarked on her journey to the northern realm in bitter acceptance. It had rained the moment she arrived, the castle dark and uninviting, with thorns crawling onto the obsidian walls. The Duke, an oblivious and shy man, did not greet her at the grand entrance. Instead, she was met by the Duke's advisor, a man with a curiously boyish features.

Humiliation welled up within the villainess' heart, for she felt as if she were being played the fool by the entire duchy. On the eve of her arrival, anxiety gnawed at her like a relentless spectre.

As night descended, the Duke, mustering his courage, attempted to approach the vexed lady.

But when the villainess beheld his masked face, terror seized her like a vice. "Stay back! You hideous beast!" she cried out, her voice trembling with fear, and she recoiled, her steps faltering as she retreated from him.

The Duke, wounded by her cruel words, attempted to console her, his outstretched hand beseeching understanding. Yet, her irrational dread overcame her, and she continued her backward retreat until, with a heart-stopping scream, she slipped from an open window.

That was how the villainess' life ended.

you hadn't actually read the book, but it wasn't difficult identifying who you got reincarnated as

especially with how your best friend obsessed over this villainess because, and i quote, "if pretty, why evil, huh???"

you woke up a week before the villainess would depart for the North, but that week alone was enough to make you understand the way she acted

every day, you were fed portions fitting of a child, had your skin rubbed raw as you were bathed, and not a moment of your mother's nitpicking about a sudden imperfection she found in you

in truth, you were more than glad to leave for the North, even if that's where your life would be on the line

the survival plan was simple: maintain an amicable relationship with the duchy until the night the heroine stumbles in to ask for a night of shelter, to which the heroine would heal the emotional wounds of the Duke, and share with him the beauty of love, bringing warmth into his heart

and so, you arrived at the estate, the castle tall and intimidating with the clouds dark and foreboding

still, you stepped out of your carriage (with wobbly legs) and met the advisor (your friend's favourite character, in fact)

the advisor, lilia, though seemed young, was actually the very man who raised the duke in the absence of his parents

he welcomed you as the lady of the duchy, and led you to your quarters

by nightfall, you were quite comfortable with living in the estate

everyone was polite, the food was delicious (and properly sized), and you had no doubt you'd settle nicely here

as a precaution to the death sequence, you decided to take a stroll in the rose garden after dinner

if you were already on the ground floor, you couldn't fall to your death, right?

but unexpectedly, you encountered a lone figure in the centre of the garden

he was incredibly tall, dressed simply, his emerald eyes fixated on the estate

upon closer inspection, you noticed he had long horns as well, perhaps he was a gazelle beastman?

either way, you were curious about what it was that held his attention so strongly that he couldn't notice your presence

"Excuse me, sir? May I ask what is so interesting about the building?" you timidly break the silence of the night.

The man turns to you, his eyes widening in surprise. "... Do you not know who I am?"

You blinked in confusion at his words. His words filled you with a sense of foreboding. You wondered if this person matched any of the characters your friend had so fervently described, but all you could recall was the beautiful villainess and the enigmatic advisor to the Duke.

"My apologies, I'm afraid I do not... May I know your name, sir?"

A faint smile tugged at the corners of his lips as he considered your question. "No... If that is the case, you may call me whatever you wish."

Perplexed by his response, you tried to come up with a suitable name. "Then... May I call you Mr. Gazelle?"

Upon hearing your words, he burst out in laughter. "Hahaha! What an interesting choice. Very well, I accept the name," he said. "In response to your first question, I was observing the gargoyles of the building."

on that night, not only did you learn more about the fascinating functions gargoyles serve, you also made your first friend in this life

strangely enough, you didn't meet the duke at all unlike the novel, which though strange, you greatly welcomed

if you didn't have any ties with him, then it'd be so much easier to just divorce him, get the money, and live a comfortable luxurious life far away from the main characters

though as you say that, you find yourself wanting to spend more and more time with "Mr Gazelle"

despite his intimidating appearance, he turned out to be a very generous person, frequently gifting you little trinkets he's made or bouquets he's arranged

he's started calling you "Briar", after the roses in the garden where he met you

you greatly appreciated the nickname, it felt better to be called that than the name of the villainess, that you could just be yourself and not play the role of a villainess avoiding ruin

you also find that whatever musings you've mentioned to him, they somehow manifest themselves

oh? you wish you could learn about embroidery? the next day there's a basket full of the highest quality threads and fabrics, with a gentle tutor to help you learn

(you still remember how cute "Mr Gazelle" looked when you gave him your first finished product, a handkerchief with an embroidered gargoyle)

what's this? you'd like to try more desserts from the capital you were never allowed to try? say no more! the next day the chef presents you with 10 different choices!

so you assumed he was an advisor of sorts to the Duke, because how else could your requests be granted so easily?

but one day, around two months after you started living in the duchy, "Mr Gazelle" asked you questions about the duke, whether you were afraid of him, would you prefer to meet him, curious questions like that

though surprised by the topic, you answered honestly, saying you don't really believe in the rumours (because you know from your friend he's an ethereal beauty) and yes, you would like to meet your husband

and what do you know? lilia informs you the duke wants to share dinner with you. what a coincidence!! :)

Nervousness held you in its grasp as you stepped into the room. Your gaze remained fixed on the carpet beneath your feet, and your knees bent gracefully as you executed the perfect curtsey.

"Your Grace."

You could hear sounds of shuffling, and then a pair of black boots entered your field of vision. Familiar hands found yours, guiding you to rise and stand upright. "Rise, my Briar," he murmured gently.

With hesitant anticipation, you finally looked up, taking in the obsidian mask that concealed his face. That voice, that nickname, and those enchanting eyes—it was all too familiar.

"Mr Gazelle..." you whispered in disbelief.

His eyes narrowed in mirth as he chuckled. "Although I hold great fondness for that name, I do wish you could call your husband by his name," he said as he began to remove his mask.

"Malleus..." you breathed.

A tender smile graced his lips, and his eyes sparkled with affection as he delicately brushed a stray lock of hair from your face—a gesture he had done countless times before. "My sweet Briar, I implore you to forgive me for deceiving you. I wished nothing more but to know you," he pleaded.

Oh, with how loud your heart was pounding in your chest, you realized that you were irrevocably and hopelessly ensnared in a love story that had deviated far from the original story.

But you didn't feel a single ounce of regret.

Masterlist

if you liked this post, don't forget to reblog!

[zvaigzdelasas]

[Story was published before the US & UK initiated airstrikes on Yemen]

An oil tanker was seized by the Iranian navy in the waters between Iran and Oman on Thursday, according to [Iranian] state media.

Iran's state-run news agency IRNA published a brief story confirming the seizure by the navy but did not identify the vessel.[...]

In 2023, the same tanker was seized by the United States in a sanctions enforcement operation [sic] as it was taking Iran oil to China. Then called the Suez Rajan, it was later renamed to the St. Nikolas.

White House spokesperson John Kirby condemned the seizure of the oil tanker and called on Iran to "immediately release the ship and its crew."

"Its provocative and unacceptable actions need to stop," he said.

11 Jan 24

[milktearosethorn]

I think a lot of 'chronically online' people, especially those who are younger, would benefit from learning more about the history of internet harassment campaigns.

From Gamer Gate to Chris-Chan to Depp vs. Heard to the origins of swatting and everything in between. There is a very ugly undercurrent where once something becomes just cringe enough to be memeable, the alt-right can seize power and radicalize people into committing heinous acts of doxxing and harassment. They make jokes out of some of the most serious issues harming people in our society. The internet has literally pushed select individuals to the brink of insanity and suicide for that sake of joke. Innocent or not, no one deserves a trial by twitter or reddit or 4chan.

It's very disturbing seeing people who self-identify as leftists take part in the milking of the next lolcow. You're playing into the hands of nazis. It's no coincidence that harassment campaigns against Dream had origins in the neo-nazi website Kiwi Farms, and significant parts of the MCYT community chose to carry on this torch. It's disgusting and frightening.

If you're going to participate in online communities and spaces, please, please know the history behind this, and think twice before you follow the next hate mob. These kinds of campaigns are designed to suck people in and appeal to the lizard parts of our brains. It takes an active effort to not take part.

[sighmurderbot]

Are you, like me, suddenly obsessed with COD and want to write fanfic, but you don't want to always follow the canon missions?

Introducing: the mission generator. Pick one thing from each catagory and write away. Assembled from various resources and my head.

Objective:

<air strike / aid / arm / assassinate / assault / bombard / breach / build / bypass / capture / clear / contact / contain / control / defend / destroy / disarm / disaster relief / disengage / disinformation / distract / escort / extract / guard / identify / infiltrate / interrogate / isolate / investigation / lead / liberate / medical assistance / neutralize / occupy / patrol / propagandize / recon / recruit / repair / rescue / sabotage / seize / supply / surveillance / train>

Target:

<ship / dictator / informant / army / navy / armor / missile / chemical gas / estate / financial institution / airplane / organization / religious icon / subject matter expert / terrorist cell / journalist / rebels / airforce / drug trafficker / intelligence agency / factory / general / supply chain / submarine / enemy base / hostage / safe house / WMD / monument / leader / deserters / militia / research center / lab / bridge / mountain pass>

Unforseen Complication:

<old rival / dependant / redundant cell / transportation problems / competition / blown cover / legal trouble / old enemy / natural disaster / love interest / old friend / wounded / illness / journalists / bad weather / civil unrest / emergency election / civilians in need / double agent / weapon malfunction / team separated / betrayal / mistaken identity / regime change / deserters / ambush / bad Intel / false flag op / sabotage / traps / hacking / capture / setup>

Location:

<city / town / village / estate / mountains / abandoned house / military base / port / desert / forest / plains / river / ocean / tunnel / caves / swamp / jungle / coast / volcano / ruins / arctic / tundra / hills / canyon / mountain pass>

[lunarsilver]

What awaits you in November? PAC

Hello, welcome to another monthly reading! This time a pretty chill one, with charms and shufflemancy. If you're feeling down, you may want to read it, because my charms are hyping up everyone here, I swear xD.

REMEMBER

I’m not a doctor, a psychiatrist, a therapist nor a psychologist. Divination will never replace meetings with them.

It’s a general reading, so not everything will resonate.

If you can’t choose between two piles, probably both of them have some messages for you. You can also not identify with any of them, and that’s okay, too.

Readings can help you make a decision, but they shouldn’t be the main reason for making it.

1 ~ 2 ~ 3

Pile 1

Charms: strength in the group, be brave!, and I love you for it!, seize the moment, new is exciting, I dreamed you!

Songs: “Loser, Baby” from Hazbin Hotel, “Human” by Rag’n’Bone Man, Le Bien qui fait mal from Mozart Opera Rock

There is this strong emphasis on acceptance of your limitations and finding some friendly souls (or maybe deepening the friendship with the people you’re already friends with). The encouragement to do what you want. Not everyone is right for you, and there always will be someone more talented/hardworking than you, but this November you should understand there are a lot of possibilities around you. Go out, have fun.

Pile 2

Charms: you are a master, seize the moment, call the team, just waiting for this, you can count on me, join the game!, you will succeed! :), party?

Songs: Somewhere Only We Know by Keane, The City’s Yours by Jamie Foxx and Quvenzhane Wallis, Rule #4 - Fish in a Birdcage by  Fish in a Birdcage

This pile is even more party-going and outgoing than the first one - or rather, the encouragement to go out with some people and try something new is here even more insistent. Doesn’t matter if “the game” is literally some kind of a game (I feel that some of you will go out with some people to a place with retro games or go bowling) or some project you’re thinking about, you’ll succeed. With the first and last song, I feel like one specific person will be pretty important this month. Or maybe two? For some reason, a grandma came to my mind (take her to the place which is dear to both of you), though a friend or partner are also very plausible.

Pile 3

Charms: success!, it will get better, a good plan is a must, let them say what they want, shall we make up something? (the charm is in my language and the sentence can also mean “let’s paint something” and “let's do something thoughtless but fun”), shall we stand together?, there is nothing like home, let's do something stupid

Songs: Time Machine by Ingrid Michaelson, Overdose by natori, Snowman by Sia

The way the first song has a verse “You slammed that door and left me standing all alone” and one of the charms says “shall we stand together?”??? It looks like there’s a period of healing after something or someone, some ex? Some toxic friend? Someone you (have) cared about and they hurt you, that’s for sure. It looks like someone else will come up in the picture at the right moment and encourage you to have some silly, almost childish fun with them. This troublemaker vibe is strong with them, but the other charms make me think they’re quite sweet. Like, "let's do some stupid shit to light up your mood".

[whencyclopedia]

Rosetta Stone

The Rosetta Stone is an incomplete grey and pink granodiorite stela dating from 196 BCE which presents a priestly decree concerning King Ptolemy V of Egypt. The text is in three different versions: Hieroglyphic, Demotic and Greek, a fact which immeasurably helped to finally decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics. The Rosetta Stone is today on display in the British Museum, London.

Recovery

The Rosetta Stone was discovered at Port Saint Julien, el-Rashid (Rosetta) on the Nile Delta in Egypt in 1799 CE by Pierre François Xavier Bouchard. Bouchard was an officer of engineers in Napoleon's army, and he extracted the stone from an old wall which was being demolished as part of the construction work on Fort Julien. Bouchard's commanding officer, one General Menou, realising its importance, had the stone sent to Alexandria. Casts and copies were made, but the stone was later seized by the British general Tomkins Turner and so the artefact eventually found a permanent home in the British Museum in London.

Several noted international scholars endeavoured to use the Rosetta stone to decipher hieroglyphics, but it was the Englishman Thomas Young who first identified some of the hieroglyphs which related to Ptolemy V Epiphanes (205-180 BCE) and the direction in which the symbols should be read. However, it was in the early 1820s CE that the Egyptian language text was fully deciphered by the French scholar Jean-François Champollion who discovered that the hieroglyphics were, in fact, a mixture of alphabetic, determinative and syllabic elements. Consequently, the full significance of Egyptian hieroglyphs, lost for 1600 years, was finally re-discovered.

Continue reading...

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Leveraged buyouts are not like mortgages

I'm coming to DEFCON! On FRIDAY (Aug 9), I'm emceeing the EFF POKER TOURNAMENT (noon at the Horseshoe Poker Room), and appearing on the BRICKED AND ABANDONED panel (5PM, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01). On SATURDAY (Aug 10), I'm giving a keynote called "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" (noon, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01).

Here's an open secret: the confusing jargon of finance is not the product of some inherent complexity that requires a whole new vocabulary. Rather, finance-talk is all obfuscation, because if we called finance tactics by their plain-language names, it would be obvious that the sector exists to defraud the public and loot the real economy.

Take "leveraged buyout," a polite name for stealing a whole goddamned company:

Identify a company that owns valuable assets that are required for its continued operation, such as the real-estate occupied by its outlets, or even its lines of credit with suppliers;

Approach lenders (usually banks) and ask for money to buy the company, offering the company itself (which you don't own!) as collateral on the loan;

Offer some of those loaned funds to shareholders of the company and convince a key block of those shareholders (for example, executives with large stock grants, or speculators who've acquired large positions in the company, or people who've inherited shares from early investors but are disengaged from the operation of the firm) to demand that the company be sold to the looters;

Call a vote on selling the company at the promised price, counting on the fact that many investors will not participate in that vote (for example, the big index funds like Vanguard almost never vote on motions like this), which means that a minority of shareholders can force the sale;

Once you own the company, start to strip-mine its assets: sell its real-estate, start stiffing suppliers, fire masses of workers, all in the name of "repaying the debts" that you took on to buy the company.

This process has its own euphemistic jargon, for example, "rightsizing" for layoffs, or "introducing efficiencies" for stiffing suppliers or selling key assets and leasing them back. The looters – usually organized as private equity funds or hedge funds – will extract all the liquid capital – and give it to themselves as a "special dividend." Increasingly, there's also a "divi recap," which is a euphemism for borrowing even more money backed by the company's assets and then handing it to the private equity fund:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/17/divi-recaps/#graebers-ghost

If you're a Sopranos fan, this will all sound familiar, because when the (comparatively honest) mafia does this to a business, it's called a "bust-out":

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

The mafia destroys businesses on a onesy-twosey, retail scale; but private equity and hedge funds do their plunder wholesale.

It's how they killed Red Lobster:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/23/spineless/#invertebrates

And it's what they did to hospitals:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/28/5000-bats/#charnel-house

It's what happened to nursing homes, Armark, private prisons, funeral homes, pet groomers, nursing homes, Toys R Us, The Olive Garden and Pet Smart:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben

It's what happened to the housing co-ops of Cooper Village, Texas energy giant TXU, Old Country Buffet, Harrah's and Caesar's:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/14/billionaire-class-solidarity/#club-deals

And it's what's slated to happen to 2.9m Boomer-owned US businesses employing 32m people, whose owners are nearing retirement:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/16/schumpeterian-terrorism/#deliberately-broken

Now, you can't demolish that much of the US productive economy without attracting some negative attention, so the looter spin-machine has perfected some talking points to hand-wave away the criticism that borrowing money using something you don't own as collateral in order to buy it and wreck it is obviously a dishonest (and potentially criminal) destructive practice.

The most common one is that borrowing money against an asset you don't own is just like getting a mortgage. This is such a badly flawed analogy that it is really a testament to the efficacy of the baffle-em-with-bullshit gambit to convince us all that we're too stupid to understand how finance works.

Sure: if I put an offer on your house, I will go to my credit union and ask the for a mortgage that uses your house as collateral. But the difference here is that you own your house, and the only way I can buy it – the only way I can actually get that mortgage – is if you agree to sell it to me.

Owner-occupied homes typically have uncomplicated ownership structures. Typically, they're owned by an individual or a couple. Sometimes they're the property of an estate that's divided up among multiple heirs, whose relationship is mediated by a will and a probate court. Title can be contested through a divorce, where disputes are settled by a divorce court. At the outer edge of complexity, you get things like polycules or lifelong roommates who've formed an LLC s they can own a house among several parties, but the LLC will have bylaws, and typically all those co-owners will be fully engaged in any sale process.

Leveraged buyouts don't target companies with simple ownership structures. They depend on firms whose equity is split among many parties, some of whom will be utterly disengaged from the firm's daily operations – say, the kids of an early employee who got a big stock grant but left before the company grew up. The looter needs to convince a few of these "owners" to force a vote on the acquisition, and then rely on the idea that many of the other shareholders will simply abstain from a vote. Asset managers are ubiquitous absentee owners who own large stakes in literally every major firm in the economy. The big funds – Vanguard, Blackrock, State Street – "buy the whole market" (a big share in every top-capitalized firm on a given stock exchange) and then seek to deliver returns equal to the overall performance of the market. If the market goes up by 5%, the index funds need to grow by 5%. If the market goes down by 5%, then so do those funds. The managers of those funds are trying to match the performance of the market, not improve on it (by voting on corporate governance decisions, say), or to beat it (by only buying stocks of companies they judge to be good bets):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/17/shareholder-socialism/#asset-manager-capitalism

Your family home is nothing like one of these companies. It doesn't have a bunch of minority shareholders who can force a vote, or a large block of disengaged "owners" who won't show up when that vote is called. There isn't a class of senior managers – Chief Kitchen Officer! – who have been granted large blocks of options that let them have a say in whether you will become homeless.

Now, there are homes that fit this description, and they're a fucking disaster. These are the "heirs property" homes, generally owned by the Black descendants of enslaved people who were given the proverbial 40 acres and a mule. Many prosperous majority Black settlements in the American South are composed of these kinds of lots.

Given the historical context – illiterate ex-slaves getting property as reparations or as reward for fighting with the Union Army – the titles for these lands are often muddy, with informal transfers from parents to kids sorted out with handshakes and not memorialized by hiring lawyers to update the deeds. This has created an irresistible opportunity for a certain kind of scammer, who will pull the deeds, hire genealogists to map the family trees of the original owners, and locate distant descendants with homeopathically small claims on the property. These descendants don't even know they own these claims, don't even know about these ancestors, and when they're offered a few thousand bucks for their claim, they naturally take it.

Now, armed with a claim on the property, the heirs property scammers force an auction of it, keeping the process under wraps until the last instant. If they're really lucky, they're the only bidder and they can buy the entire property for pennies on the dollar and then evict the family that has lived on it since Reconstruction. Sometimes, the family will get wind of the scam and show up to bid against the scammer, but the scammer has deep capital reserves and can easily win the auction, with the same result:

https://www.propublica.org/series/dispossessed

A similar outrage has been playing out for years in Hawai'i, where indigenous familial claims on ancestral lands have been diffused through descendants who don't even know they're co-owner of a place where their distant cousins have lived since pre-colonial times. These descendants are offered small sums to part with their stakes, which allows the speculator to force a sale and kick the indigenous Hawai'ians off their family lands so they can be turned into condos or hotels. Mark Zuckerberg used this "quiet title and partition" scam to dispossess hundreds of Hawai'ian families:

https://archive.is/g1YZ4

Heirs property and quiet title and partition are a much better analogy to a leveraged buyout than a mortgage is, because they're ways of stealing something valuable from people who depend on it and maintain it, and smashing it and selling it off.

Strip away all the jargon, and private equity is just another scam, albeit one with pretensions to respectability. Its practitioners are ripoff artists. You know the notorious "carried interest loophole" that politicians periodically discover and decry? "Carried interest" has nothing to do with the interest on a loan. The "carried interest" rule dates back to 16th century sea-captains, and it refers to the "interest" they had in the cargo they "carried":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/29/writers-must-be-paid/#carried-interest

Private equity managers are like sea captains in exactly the same way that leveraged buyouts are like mortgages: not at all.

And it's not like private equity is good to its investors: scams like "continuation funds" allow PE looters to steal all the money they made from strip mining valuable companies, so they show no profits on paper when it comes time to pay their investors:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/20/continuation-fraud/#buyout-groups

Those investors are just as bamboozled as we are, which is why they keep giving more money to PE funds. Today, the "dry powder" (uninvested money) that PE holds has reached an all-time record high of $2.62 trillion – money from pension funds and rich people and sovereign wealth funds, stockpiled in anticipation of buying and destroying even more profitable, productive, useful businesses:

https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/2di1vzgjcmzovkcea8f0g/portfolio/private-equitys-dry-powder-mountain-reaches-record-height

The practices of PE are crooked as hell, and it's only the fact that they use euphemisms and deceptive analogies to home mortgages that keeps them from being shut down. The more we strip away the bullshit, the faster we'll be able to kill this cancer, and the more of the real economy we'll be able to preserve.

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/2024/08/05/rugged-individuals/#misleading-by-analogy

[pmamtraveller]

GUSTAV KLIMT - PORTRAIT OF ADELE BLOCH-BAUER I, 1904-1907

Adele is seen in the painting wearing a choker adorned with jewels. Even though the complex mosaics add some challenge in identifying, she is sitting on a chair with two tall arms adorned with golden spirals, only noticeable due to their contrast against the gold-speckled backdrop. Her fair complexion features flushed cheeks, and her dark hair is styled up. Adele's realistic physical traits stand out in stark contrast to the patterns and stylizations found throughout the rest of the artwork.

The husband of the subject, a wealthy French industrialist Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, commissioned Klimt to create this artwork. It is one of Klimt's most renowned artworks and is also known as the 'Austrian Mona Lisa'. Ferdinand Bloch was a passionate collector of art. He and his wife were both friends and avid backers of Klimt's art, though Adele had been acquainted with him for several years before Ferdinand. There is some speculation regarding whether Adele had a closer relationship with Klimt prior to getting married.

While mostly featuring gold, Klimt incorporated pops of vibrant hues like greens, blues, and reds. A checkered pattern in black and white divides the green floor from the golden walls.

The painting stayed with the Bloch-Bauer family until 1938, when Ferdinand was forced to leave Vienna by the Nazis due to alleged tax evasion. The State seized all of his possessions, including this item, and sold them at a discount to the Nazis. The artwork was relocated to the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere in Vienna, Austria, and its name was changed to “Lady in Gold"

[blueiscoool]

1,100-Year-Old Viking Sword Found in UK River

A corroded sword pulled from an English river by a magnet fisher is a Viking weapon dating to between A.D. 850 and 975, experts have confirmed.

Trevor Penny was searching for lost and discarded objects in the River Cherwell in Oxfordshire in November 2023 when he made the discovery. The magnet fisher had been down on his luck that day and only pulled scaffolding poles from the water, he said in a message on Facebook. When Penny lugged out the sword, he didn't immediately recognize what it was.

"I was on the side of the bridge and shouted to a friend on the other side of the bridge, 'What is this?'" Penny, who is a member of the Thame Magnet Fishing Facebook group, recalled in the message. "He came running over shouting, 'It looks like a sword!'"

Penny immediately uploaded images of the sword to Google to try to identify it. "Whatever photo angle I tried was coming up with Viking sword," Penny said. The magnet fisher then contacted the Oxfordshire county liaison officer responsible for recording archaeological finds made by the public, and took the sword to be examined by experts.

The sword, only provisionally dated until now, has been authenticated as Viking and estimated to date as far back as 1,200 years ago.

The weapon dates to a period when the Vikings, who were originally pagans from Scandinavia, traveled to the British Isles to plunder, conquer and trade with the ruling Saxons. The Vikings set foot on British soil in the eighth century, having raided a monastery on Lindisfarne, an island off Britain's northeast coast, in 793. Similar raids in Britain occurred for several centuries and escalated after 835, when larger Viking fleets started arriving and fighting royal armies. British kings gradually reconquered territory seized by the Vikings throughout the 10th century and unified what was a patchwork of kingdoms into a new realm called Englalond.

Viking incursions and periods of rule continued until the 11th century, but the Viking Age ended following the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066, with the defeat of the king of Norway, Harald III Sigurdsson, by the Saxons.

The newly discovered Viking sword is in the care of Oxford museum services and may eventually be put on display, the Oxford Mail reported.

"The officer said it was archaeologically rare to find whole swords and treasure of historical importance still intact," Penny told the regional newspaper last week. "There was a little dispute with the landowner and the rivers trust who don't permit magnet fishing. The latter sent a legal document saying they wouldn't take action on the condition that the sword was passed to a museum, which I had done."

By Sascha Pare.