#So proud of Warren!!!!!

[amstramgramcolegram]

Somebody is still traumatized from losing this World Cup final and needs to go see a therapist. He has been uncharacteristically bad this month. It’s been nearly two months, please try to move on!!!! Like this shit is obviously psychological!!!!! Go see a doc! Marseille is right behind us for the title, we can’t lose against them !

Why can’t he score anymore? (The cup game against amateurs doesn’t count). I genuinely think that what has been happening is a mental block. There is no other explanations! It’s like when Serena kept losing her finals to get her 24th title.

Half of the team is either depressed, or injured, or suspended or children!!!!

Edit: his injury is serious. Oh god, we are cursed.

[bbcphile]

Elizabeth Warren just sent out exactly the message I needed to hear to feel less miserable and hopeless about everything, so I’m sharing it in case anyone else wants to hear her talk about what to do next and how to process this catastrophe:

Highlights from transcript: “I will not ask you to look for any silver linings. I will not ask you to feel anything but grief right now. Donald Trump won the election and the consequences will be real and devastating. But I’m reminding myself and you that on the road ahead, there will still be opportunities to fight back.

I can’t tell you that we will win all of those fights. I can’t tell you that we will win most or even any of them. But when we arrive at each of those moments, we will face a choice: to give up or to press forward.

The far right wants us to feel powerless [. . . ] to lose trust in our ability to ever, ever make change. I absolutely refuse to give them that satisfaction. We will continue to fight for each other.

[. . .]

They’ll hope we don’t have the stomach to push back anymore, but we can prove them wrong. We need each other. We take care of each other.

And please, take care of yourself right now. Take the time you need to be angry, hurt, and confused. Hold your loved ones close. Find opportunities to be in community with others this week. Take social media breaks. Foster your connections. Make new ones. Reach out to someone you've lost touch with. Tell them you're with them no matter what lies ahead.

If the work you do makes a difference for just one person, that would be enough.”

[samglyph]

Rare W for man who is experiencing the worst day of his life (ongoing)

Bonus design process notes for Warren under the cut cause idk if I like what I have yet

[vertigoartgore]

Gambit in action by Daniel Warren Johnson (from Heroes Con 2024).

[everythingundertheskycomics]

Pretend.

Hippo Crush

2/4

Previous

[zurdurer]

Day 20 : Mutants !!!

I have never drawn either of these guys before BUT may I present to you 2 of my favourite mutants , Warren Stone and Hypnopotomus,,

I love these goons so this was fun :]

(I know Hypno looks sketchy but I didn't fancy full clean outlines lol)

[derpiedoxie]

Straight through the heart

Warning: Small depiction of blood and bright colours

First art fight attack of 2023 >:D

The character featured in this attack is Warren, and he belongs to Fooffle (YouTube, Artfight)

[champagns]

28th of february   𝟭𝟵𝟵𝟲   in   detroit, michigan    [   …   ]    gwen  receives  an   anonymous   phone  call.

[hershelwidget]

Electric Love!

THEY CAME OUT SOOO GOOODD!!!!

I wasn’t originally going to make them monochromatic, but I got too attached to their outline colours and now, uh, here we are! Guess I’m doing this for each team!

Also! These will be based off of scenes! Electric Love’s scene takes place outside as it gets darker, and it is their first reactions to the Hatred Duo, whom they have finally found. [Click for higher quality!]

[peachpotions]

JAWBREAKER

Love is a Battlefield (x)

[thearcherbrothersx]

Secretly pleased with her ability to stay put and quiet - even if he hadn't made that specific command - Declan went about his business, giving his own mind the clarity it needed to continue focusing on her. As much as Declan could ignore the mess he'd allowed in the bathroom, he knew that as soon as they were in the tub and his mind was allowed to drift - if only for a second - it would linger on that mess. So while he was definitely doing it to test her, it was just as necessary for his own peace of mind.

He finished up by tucking the essential oils he'd already used back in the cupboard. Then he turned and faced his restless submissive, taking note of the way her fingers moving along the outside of her thighs. He allowed only the tiniest movement at the corners of his lips. Then he moved back to her, gently placed his lightly curled fist beneath her chin, thumb atop it, and guided her features up to meet his as he bent his head down. He paused, nose just an inch from hers. "You're behaving so beautifully, angel," he spoke softly, voice low, and in an obvious display of his appreciation, he then allowed his lips to meet hers. Wrapping his other arm around her as he did, he drew her soft body against his and tilted his head slightly to deepen the kiss.

The caress of his fingers, the tenor of his voice, made her shiver slightly. His touch was validating, but more so Cora felt proud of herself, knowing she had pleased him. As much fun as there was in playing and pushing, in getting punishments and corrections, she thoroughly enjoyed knowing when he was happy with her. So as much as she was tempted, there was no whining, no complaining when he pulled his hand from her. The only indication of her displeasure was a subtle pout, her full lower lip slightly jutted out.

His wish was her command, or was is that his command was her wish? Cora really couldn’t tell the difference anymore. Only her eyes followed him. It was hard, in these pockets of quiet, not to start spouting questions. She was endlessly curious, and it'd been a defense mechanism for a long time. In her formative years, silence had been a sign of bad things coming. She was doing her best, though, to remind herself that there was no badness here, that, even if the methods were unconventional, there had only ever really been pleasure and care. So she stayed put, watching, only the tips of her fingers moving as they mindlessly brushed against her thighs.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The Google antitrust remedy should extinguish surveillance, not democratize it

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).

If you are even slightly plugged into the doings and goings on in this tired old world of ours, then you have heard that Google has lost its antitrust case against the DOJ Antitrust Division, and is now an official, no-foolin', convicted monopolist.

This is huge. Epochal. The DOJ, under the leadership of the fire-breathing trustbuster Jonathan Kanter, has done something that was inconceivable four years ago when he was appointed. On Kanter's first day on the job as head of the Antitrust Division, he addressed his gathered prosecutors and asked them to raise their hands if they'd never lost a case.

It was a canny trap. As the proud, victorious DOJ lawyers thrust their arms into the air, Kanter quoted James Comey, who did the same thing on his first day on the job as DA for the Southern District of New York: "You people are the chickenshit club." A federal prosecutor who never loses a case is a prosecutor who only goes after easy targets, and leave the worst offenders (who can mount a serious defense) unscathed.

Under Kanter, the Antitrust Division has been anything but a Chickenshit Club. They've gone after the biggest game, the hardest targets, and with Google, they bagged the hardest target of all.

Again: this is huge:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/boom-judge-rules-google-is-a-monopolist

But also: this is just the start.

Now that Google is convicted, the court needs to decide what to do about it. Courts have lots of leeway when it comes to addressing a finding of lawbreaking. They can impose "conduct remedies" ("don't do that anymore"). These are generally considered weaksauce, because they're hard to administer. When you tell a company like Google to stop doing something, you need to expend a lot of energy to make sure they're following orders. Conduct remedies are as much a punishment for the government (which has to spend millions closely observing the company to ensure compliance) as they are for the firms involved.

But the court could also order Google to stop doing certain things. For example, since the ruling finds that Google illegally maintained its monopoly by paying other entities – Apple, Mozilla, Samsung, AT&T, etc – to be the default search, the court could order them to stop doing that. At the very least, that's a lot easier to monitor.

The big guns, though are the structural remedies. The court could order Google to sell off parts of its business, like its ad-tech stack, through which it represents both buyers and sellers in a marketplace it owns, and with whom it competes as a buyer and a seller. There's already proposed, bipartisan legislation to do this (how bipartisan? Its two main co-sponsors are Ted Cruz and Elizabeth Warren!):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/25/structural-separation/#america-act

All of these things, and more, are on the table:

https://www.wired.com/story/google-search-monopoly-judge-amit-mehta-options/

We'll get a better sense of what the judge is likely to order in the fall, but the case could drag out for quite some time, as Google appeals the verdict, then tries for the Supreme Court, then appeals the remedy, and so on and so on. Dragging things out in the hopes of running out the clock is a time-honored tradition in tech antitrust. IBM dragged out its antitrust appeals for 12 years, from 1970 to 1982 (they called it "Antitrust's Vietnam"). This is an expensive gambit: IBM outspent the entire DOJ Antitrust Division for 12 consecutive years, hiring more lawyers to fight the DOJ than the DOJ employed to run all of its antitrust enforcement, nationwide. But it worked. IBM hung in there until Reagan got elected and ordered his AG to drop the case.

This is the same trick Microsoft pulled in the nineties. The case went to trial in 1998, and Microsoft lost in 1999. They appealed, and dragged out the proceedings until GW Bush stole the presidency in 2000 and dropped the case in 2001.

I am 100% certain that there are lawyers at Google thinking about this: "OK, say we put a few hundred million behind Trump-affiliated PACs, wait until he's president, have a little meeting with Attorney General Andrew Tate, and convince him to drop the case. Worked for IBM, worked for Microsoft, it'll work for us. And it'll be a bargain."

That's one way things could go wrong, but it's hardly the only way. In his ruling, Judge Mehta rejected the DOJ's argument that in illegally creating and maintaining its monopoly, Google harmed its users' privacy by foreclosing on the possibility of a rival that didn't rely on commercial surveillance.

The judge repeats some of the most cherished and absurd canards of the marketing industry, like the idea that people actually like advertisements, provided that they're relevant, so spying on people is actually doing them a favor by making it easier to target the right ads to them.

First of all, this is just obvious self-serving rubbish that the advertising industry has been repeating since the days when it was waging a massive campaign against the TV remote on the grounds that people would "steal" TV by changing the channel when the ads came on. If "relevant" advertising was so great, then no one would reach for the remote – or better still, they'd change the channel when the show came back on, looking for more ads. People don't like advertising. And they hate "relevant" advertising that targets their private behaviors and views. They find it creepy.

Remember when Apple offered users a one-click opt-out from Facebook spying, the most sophisticated commercial surveillance system in human history, whose entire purpose was to deliver "relevant" advertising? More than 96% of Apple's customers opted out of surveillance. Even the most Hayek-pilled economist has to admit that this is a a hell of a "revealed preference." People don't want "relevant" advertising. Period.

The judge's credulous repetition of this obvious nonsense is doubly disturbing in light of the nature of the monopoly charge against Google – that the company had monopolized the advertising market.

Don't get me wrong: Google has monopolized the advertising market. They operate a "full stack" ad-tech shop. By controlling the tools that sellers and buyers use, and the marketplace where they use them, Google steals billions from advertisers and publishers. And that's before you factor in Jedi Blue, the illegal collusive arrangement the company has with Facebook, by which they carved up the market to increase their profits, gouge advertisers, starve publishers, and keep out smaller rivals:

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

One effect of Google's monopoly power is a global privacy crisis. In regions with strong privacy laws (like the EU), Google uses flags of convenience (looking at you, Ireland) to break the law with impunity:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

In the rest of the world, Google works with other members of the surveillance cartel to prevent the passage of privacy laws. That's why the USA hasn't had a new federal privacy law since 1988, when Congress acted to ban video-store clerks from telling newspaper reporters about the VHS cassettes you took home:

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

The lack of privacy law and privacy enforcement means that Google can inflict untold privacy harms on billions of people around the world. Everything we do, everywhere we go online and offline, every relationship we have, everything we buy and say and do – it's all collected and stored and mined and used against us. The immediate harm here is the haunting sense that you are always under observation, a violation of your fundamental human rights that prevents you from ever being your authentic self:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2013/jun/14/nsa-prism

The harms of surveillance aren't merely spiritual and psychological – they're material and immediate. The commercial surveillance industry provides the raw feedstock for a parade of horribles, from stalkers and bounty hunters turning up on their targets' front doors to cops rounding up demonstrators with location data from their phones to identity thieves tricking their marks by using leaked or purchased private information as convincers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

The problem with Google's monopolization of the surveillance business model is that they're spying on us. But for a certain kind of competition wonk, the problem is that Google is monopolizing the violation of our human rights, and we need to use competition law to "democratize" commercial surveillance.

This is deeply perverse, but it represents a central split in competition theory. Some trustbusters fetishize competition for its own sake, on the theory that it makes companies better and more efficient. But there are some things we don't want companies to be better at, like violating our human rights. We want to ban human rights violations, not improve them.

For other trustbusters – like me – the point of competition enforcement isn't merely to make companies offer better products, it's to make companies small enough to hold account through the enforcement of democratic laws. I want to break – and break up – Google because I want to end its ability to bigfoot privacy law so that we can finally root out the cancer of commercial surveillance. I don't want to make Google smaller so that other surveillance companies can get in on the game.

There is a real danger that this could emerge from this decision, and that's a danger we need to guard against. Last month, Google shocked the technical world by announcing that it would not follow through on its years-long promise to kill third-party cookies, one of the most pernicious and dangerous tools of commercial surveillance. The reason for this volte-face appears to be concern that the EU would view killing third-party cookies as anticompetitive, since Google intended to maintain commercial surveillance using its Orwellian "Privacy Sandbox" technology in Chrome, with the effect that everyone except Google would find it harder to spy on us as we used the internet:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/googles-trail-of-crumbs

It's true! This is anticompetitive. But the answer isn't to preserve the universal power of tech companies large and small to violate our human rights – it's to ban everyone, especially Google, from spying on us!

This current in competition law is still on the fringe, but the Google case – which finds the company illegally dominating surveillance advertising, but rejects the idea that surveillance is itself a harm – offers an opportunity for this bad idea to go from the fringe to the center.

If that happens, look out.

Take "attribution," an obscure bit of ad-tech jargon disguising a jaw-droppingly terrible practice. "Attribution" is when an ad-tech company shows you an ad, and then follows you everywhere you go, monitoring everything you do, to determine whether the ad convinced you to buy something. I mean that literally: they're combining location data generated by your phone and captured by Bluetooth and wifi receivers with data from your credit card to follow you everywhere and log everything, so that they can prove to a merchant that you bought something.

This is unspeakably grotesque. It should be illegal. In many parts of the world, it is illegal, but it is so lucrative that monopolists like Google can buy off the enforcers and get away with it. What's more, only the very largest corporations have the resources to surveil you so closely and invasively that they can perform this "service."

But again, some competition wonks look at this situation and say, "Well, that's not right, we need to make sure that everyone can do attribution." This was a (completely mad) premise in the (otherwise very good) 2020 Competition and Markets Authority market-study on "Online platforms and digital advertising":

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5fa557668fa8f5788db46efc/Final_report_Digital_ALT_TEXT.pdf

This (again, otherwise sensible) document veers completely off the rails whenever the subject of attribution comes up. At one point, the authors propose that the law should allow corporations to spy on people who opt out of commercial surveillance, provided that this spying is undertaken for the sole purpose of attribution.

But it gets even worse: by the end of the document, the authors propose a "user ID intervention" to give every Briton a permanent, government-issued advertising identifier to make it easier for smaller companies to do attribution.

Look, I understand why advertisers like attribution and are willing to preferentially take their business to companies that can perform it. But the fact that merchants want to be able to peer into every corner of our lives to figure out how well their ads are performing is no basis for permitting them to do so – much less intervening in the market to make it even easier so more commercial snoops can get their noses in our business!

This is an idea that keeps popping up, like in this editorial by a UK lawyer, where he proposes fixing "Google's dominance of online advertising" by making it possible for everyone to track us using the commercial surveillance identifiers created and monopolized by the ad-tech duopoly and the mobile tech duopoly:

https://www.thesling.org/what-to-do-about-googles-dominance-of-online-advertising/

Those companies are doing something rotten. In dominating ads, they have stolen billions from publishers and advertisers. Then they used those billions to capture our democratic process and ensure that our human rights weren't being defended as they plundered our private data and put us in harm's way.

Advertising will adapt. The marketing bros know this is coming. They're already discussing how to live in a world where you can't measure clicks and you can't attribute actions (e.g. the world from the first advertisements up until the early 2000s):

https://sparktoro.com/blog/attribution-is-dying-clicks-are-dying-marketing-is-going-back-to-the-20th-century/

An equitable solution to Google's monopoly will not run though our right to privacy. We don't solve the Google monopoly by creating competition in surveillance. The reason to get rid of Google's monopoly is to make it easier to end surveillance.

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/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/#extinguish-v-improve

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[joepelling]

stuff i remembered to write down from the discord stream

yellow is becky’s favorite character “because he’s a silly goofy guy” and joe’s favorite is duck

their shared fave webseries ep is computer and fave tv is family, becky thinks joe is just copying her

joe’s current favorite song is memories and becky’s current favorite is love

joe jokes they made the show just to sell merch

becky’s favorite designs are lesley and choo choo, joe’s favorites are the simple silly ones

becky describes her own voice as “a victorian schoolboy”

“becky will give every single person [that attends the show] ten pounds 😊” “from joe’s bank account 🤗”

dhmis 1 was originally about a little girl as a teacher but becky hated making human puppets

they think it’s “amazing and cool” that autistic audiences resonate with the show

their advice for new puppeteers is go to the gym and lock yourself in a fridge

becky and joe were walking to the station into a friend after wracking their brains for a title and she was holding some mini models and becky jumped up to hug her and the friend said “don’t hug me i’m scared!” and that’s where they got the name from

there’s a cut scrunty episode that follows it after it runs out of the cat flap

warren was made of silicon and lilly and todney had a lot of details making them the hardest to make

duck’s autotune was removed “to allude to the way the government is controlling us- no, basically because it was too annoying”

(someone says thank you for creating and voicing red guy) “you have no idea how much that means to me. i’m in a very low place in my life, not a lot of compliments every day, i’m going to dress as red guy every day”

they cited the hugga bunch, bruce bickford, and sally cruikshank as some influences

they’re open to adding a latin american character or a drag queen character

they’re interested in doing a physical release of the show and want to announce an international release soon

one of joe’s favorite shows as a kid was the trapdoor, becky liked zap and the movie chitty chitty bang bang

they want to announce new episodes as soon as they can but it’s an expensive and time consuming show to make so they haven’t been renewed yet

the pilot will be never be released since the company that owns it went under, they think it’s “nothing special” and they aren’t proud of it, they recommend watching “anything else”

[everythingundertheskycomics]

Warren's Stone

3/4

Previous Following

Befuddled! Bamboozled, even!

Time went and snuck past me, fool that I was.

[starmeadowsystem]

Cw for mild gore. Whoops!

...Oh. ouch.

Uh yeah thats a dying rabbit. Like by dying I mean her spine is exposed and she is bleeding out and her body will probably give out in a few seconds.

...I don't know how to make this funny, given the circumstances. See I wrote this death so like. Uh. Well.

-Stella

wait a minute...

YEAHHHHH-

my life is better

[itsmarsss]

stupid. [Peter Maximoff x Reader] (X-Men)

[~from the vault~]

Friends kiss all the time, right? Right?

Word count: 2,062

Warnings: none i don't think i even use the word fuck here like who even was i this is just fluff

[. . .]

“Okay, truth or dare?” Jubilee asked Peter, an unmistakably mischievous look on her face. 

It was funny, actually, to think that a group of mutant teenagers with unimaginable powers would be spending their weekend doing such mundane things, such as throwing a party and playing truth or dare like a bunch of seventh graders, but the truth is that none of you ever really had the chance to have that before, most always too weird to be with the normal kids.

So, truth or dare on a saturday night in the middle of the woods it was.

And of course you knew how this was going to go. You didn’t even have to be his best friend to know what he would pick without a hint of hesitation. 

“You know it,” Peter replied with a signature smirk.

Scott let out a groan. “There’s not even anything for you to do anymore!”

“There’s still plenty of stuff for me to do!” Peter defended himself, a hand over his chest feigning offense.

“No, he’s right! You never pick truth!” Warren joined Scott in complaining.

“Because I’m not boring! You guys are just laaaame.”

“I don’t know, lick that tree over there or something,” Jubilee murmured, uninterested.

“What? That’s all you got? Come on, you can do better! Dare me to run to Hawaii or something!”

“How would we know you actually went to Hawaii?” Kurt asked, and Peter tilted his head to the side, realizing what he said made sense.

“Just pick truth already!” Jean exclaimed, clearly annoyed at the amount of time his turn was taking. 

Peter put his arms up in surrender. “Okay, fine! But it’s gonna be lame.”

Jubilee quickly seemed to gain her excitement again, smiling as she thought of what to ask, snapping her fingers as she finally landed upon a question. “Okay! Have you and Y/N kissed before?” 

He seemed to be taken by surprise, shifting in his seat, and you felt your own cheeks burning, hoping the lack of light would hide it. Of course she would want to ask something like that. 

“C’mon. Something not so lame. What are we, 12?”

“Answer the question!” Scott egged him on, and Peter looked at you, silently asking you what to do. You didn’t even say anything, but you assumed he noticed how flustered you were, as he decided to spare you and lie.

“No. Happy?”

You thought they would let it go, but got confused when everyone other than you and Peter turned to Jean, who, after a moment, spoke up. “He’s lying,” she affirmed.

And then it was chaos. 

“Oh my God! When?”

“I knew it!”

“Holy shit how was it?”

“Stop reading my mind, witch!” Peter yelled. You knew him. Usually he’d be pretty proud to talk about how he 'got with the girl' or whatever. But Peter also knew you, and you both knew that you had specifically agreed to not talk about this. So he tried to change the subject. “Okay, okay, that’s not how this works. You have your answer, now spin the bottle again.”

“But-” 

“Those are the rules, Scotty.”

Annoyed, Scott reached out to spin the bottle again, and Peter winked at you. You smiled at him in return, thanking him silently. You were smart enough to know they would bug you about it later but at least you were fine for now, with enough time to come up with some bullshit excuse before you got bombarded with questions.

“Y/n it’s your turn.”

Well, maybe not so much time.

You were taken out of your thoughts by Jean’s words, averting your eyes to the bottle in front of you. Fair enough, it landed on you. Such luck.

“Truth or dare?” Scott asked you, unable to hide a grin.

“Come on, Scott.”

“You gotta choose!”

“Truth?”

“Tell us how that kiss happened.”

“Dare.”

“I… dare you to tell us how the kiss happened.”

“That’s not fair-”

“Those are the rules,” Warren intervened, repeating what Peter had said earlier, and you shot him a death glare. 

“You know I could kill you right?”

“You like me too much,” he smiled, and you sighed. You considered leaving the game, but you knew they would just annoy you until you talked.

“Fine. It was nothing, okay? We were on a mission and we had to improvise, that’s it.”

Scott’s eyebrows were furrowed together. “Wait it was for a mission?”

“Yeah,” you confirmed.

“But then it doesn’t count!”

Warren chimed in again. “What? Yes it counts-”

You looked over at Peter while all your friends debated the validity of your kiss , but he looked confused. “What?” You mouthed to him.

“That wasn’t our first kiss,” he blurted out, as if that were the most obvious thing in the world, very clearly not thinking before he spoke. Everybody else went quiet.

Warren was the first one to break the silence. “First kiss? Wait, how many times have you kissed?”

“No- it was-” Peter tried to save himself, but it was way too late. Now they wouldn’t leave you alone.

“You have to tell us!” Kurt exclaimed, and you almost felt mad at him. Almost.

Peter cleared his throat. “It was uh- when we were kids? Cause I told you I’d never kissed anyone?”

“Oh but if the mission one doesn’t count then that doesn’t count either. We were like ten!”

“What, were you not a person at ten years old?”

“Come on our real first kiss was that night at the movies wasn’t it? With the… the werewolf movie.”

“No cause that was after the one at the diner.”

“No it wasn’t! It was that one, then the time in your basement, then the diner.”

“But it doesn’t make-” Peter stopped and looked around. 

“What?” You did the same, only to see your friends look like they’d seen a ghost. They were all wide-eyed, either looking at you and Peter or at each other, trying to process the conversation the two of you were having. Okay, so maybe you got a little carried away accidentally.

“Uh-”

And then chaos again.

“You’ve kissed how many times now?”

“Are you sure you’re not together?”

“We’ve been trying to get you together for months! Months! And you tell me this?”

“But we-” you started, but what were you really gonna say? You were the one to talk too much.

Peter stood up. “We… are leaving.” He held his hand up for you to take, and you did so, standing up too. In no time you were in his room at the school, and things were awkward.

You sat down on his bed while he sat down on the chair by his desk, both in silence for a while, neither sure what to say. It was pretty common for you to do that, ignore this kind of thing. As you’d just talked about, you’d had those kinds of moments quite a few times before, but you always ended up unspokenly agreeing to not talk about it after. But it seemed that this time there was no choice.

“Um so.”

He lifted his gaze from the floor to you. “Yeah.”

“I uh. I didn’t realize uh. How many times we’ve- you know.”

“Yeah.” He was fidgeting with his fingers, looking at his hands instead of at you. You were kind of thankful for it.

“You think they’ll be too annoying about it?”

“Have you met them?”

You laughed. “Yeah. Maybe we should have just not played the game.”

“I’m sorry. Or whatever.”

“For what?”

“For bringing it up. It just… came out, you know how I speak without thinking-”

“It’s fine. We’ve kissed a few times, so what?”

“Yeah. Right. It’s what friends do! Right?” He finally looked at you.

“Yes! Platonic friends kiss sometimes. It’s normal.”

“Yeah! Totally. Totally.”

There was silence after that. One that indicated how incredibly not normal it all was.

“Can I ask you something?” Peter blurted out, out of the blue.

“Okay.”

“Did you… like… kissing me?”

“What?”

"Huh?"  He pretended he hadn’t said anything, immediately regretting saying it.

Silence again.

You thought for a moment. “Yeah.”

“What?”

“I liked it. Did you not?”

“I don’t- I-” He stood up in superspeed, but stayed within distance from you. “Yeah. A- a lot.”

“Does that- I mean that’s still like. Normal right?”

“Yeah I mean who- it’s kissing right? Why would- why wouldn’t we like that?”

“Right. Right. Yeah, of course.”

“Would it be that bad?”

“What do you mean?”

“If we were like- you know- not… friends.”

You quirked an eyebrow, and his eyes widened. “Not like that! I mean if we were like, more.”

“Like… if we dated.” It was a statement, but a question too. Were you getting this right?

“Wuh- Yeah. I guess.”

You had no idea what was going on now. After a long time of getting teased by your friends to no end about the blurry lines of your friendship with Peter, you learned to scold yourself when you caught your thoughts drifting to that. After all, you couldn’t- it would just ruin your friendship, and you didn’t want to lose your best friend. 

But now here he was, right in front of you, asking you if it would be so bad if you dated.

…would it?

“Why?”

“You didn’t answer the question.”

“I just wanna know why you’re asking!”

“Well cause maybe I’d like it if we were dating!” 

“Yeah sure,” you let out a laugh.

“I’m.. not joking.”

You went quiet.

“I know I’m not serious about… well anything I guess,” he let out a small laugh, “but I’m being like 100%, totally for real with you right now.”

“So you have… feelings for me. That’s what you’re saying.”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re not joking.”

“No! Why would I joke about that?”

“We joke about that all the time!”

“Not right now!”

“You know I’m 100% kicking your ass if you are, right?”

“I… am pretty aware.”

“Okay.”

He looked at you expectantly, but you didn’t even know what to think about this situation, let alone what to say. 

“Okay? So?” Of course, this was still your Peter, extremely nosey and incredibly impatient.

You took a good look at him. Did you like him the same way he apparently liked you?

Peter was annoying. He was loud and a lot of times way too much, and he always ended up getting you into embarrassing situations. If you ever got in trouble, it was pretty safe to say it was probably his fault. He was stubborn and cocky and annoyingly good at making things play out his way.

But he was your best friend. And he was wearing his stupid silver jacket that matched his stupid silver hair and a stupid graphic shirt with a stupid bear that wore sunglasses on it and the stupid Star Wars pin that you gave him for his stupid fourteenth birthday. He was so utterly and completely stupid, and it was stupid to think this could work.

And maybe you were stupid too, because it seemed that you liked him, a stupid amount. 

“Okay, don’t get too cocky, now.”

He kept staring at you, expecting your next words. 

“I like you too.”

“As in... more than a friend?”

“No I’m actually friendzoning you.”

Finally he opened a grin, relaxing as he caught on to your teasing tone. Now that looked more like him. “Are you? That’s good. I was actually gonna tell you I changed my mind.”

“You did?”

He walked towards you, in a normal speed for once. “Yeah. I think we should stay friends.”

You nodded. “Yeah me too.”

“Friends kiss, right?”

“Platonically.”

“Yeah, platonically.”

You laughed at how ridiculous that excuse sounded now. “We’re so stupid.”

Hee shook his head. “I don’t know what youre talking about.” 

You didn’t have time to keep the joke going, as he finally pulled you closer and leaned in.

You’d kissed a good amount of times before, but this time was different. It wasn’t impulsive, and you weren’t going to regret it after. You wouldn’t have to pretend it didn’t happen when it was over, and you really, really liked the thought of that.

But, of course, you did live with your really, really nosey friends, who you hadn’t noticed had been standing by the door.

“You guys are so confusing!”

Okay, it would be really stupid to think you would ever be able to live this one down.

[. . .]

A/N: treating you guys to these cute little oneshots today past mars was such a cutie i was gonna say i miss her but i dont really