#Toffs Suck

[msclaritea]

The elites in Britain have nearly destroyed their own country. It's no wonder they've been trying to dominate over here in entertainment, even trying to pick and choose which actors are popular, FOR US. The money is better here. Maybe the BBC should have gotten over it's fetish with the Victorian era.

[loch-detected]

I’m a fucking coward.

[im-totally-not-an-alien-2]

"Come get your child." Robin stared incredulously at this...entity? Being? He was a child himself, how could he possibly have a kid of his own.

The creature huffed, seeming very put out by the young vigilantes confusion. "What is there to not understand? Your child has been running wild in the Infinite Realms for a while now. Ever since that portal exploded hes been taking his emotions out on everyone!" The thing said, throwing her hands into the air, "And you!" Robin stepped back a pace or two when he suddenly found a very sharp claw in his face, "I had to do a lot of searching to even find you! What kind of parent are you?!"

"I'm not."

The entity opened and closed its mouth a few times like a fish before suddenly becoming furious, "Its no wonder hes like this when his gardian has so little interest in him! Did you know the other day he plugged a liquor bottle with a cloth and lit it on fire? I don't even know where he got it, but he lit the cloth and yelled something like, "mazzle toff" and threw it at my own adult son!"

"..."

"When my little boy burst into flames do you know what he said to me?"

"...no, but I feel like you're going to tell me anyways."

"I'm sorry ma'am I wasn't expecting there to be that much fire."

"That much? So he fully intended to set someone ablaze but the amount of fire is what troubled him?"

"Yes!" She growled, exasperated, "Please come get your child as soon as possible! Hes terrorizing the whole dimension!"

Damian found himself staring at open space the woman had occupied previously before contacting Oracle through the coms, "Did you get all of that?"

It was Grayson that spoke, "Every word."

---

Aka Danny has a lot of misplaced aggression and kinda terrorizes parts of the GZ. Unfortunately for him hes a clone of one of the bats (weather or not you want it to be Damian, Project R or someone else that hes cloned from is up to you) and they're coming to him to assess if he's an evil clone or mindless or whatever.

Too bad Danny sucks at first impressions.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

A business model for bankrupting the oil companies

Today (June 6), I’m on a Rightscon panel about interoperability.

Tomorrow (June 7), I’m keynoting the Re:publica conference in Berlin.

Thursday (June 8) at 8PM, I’m at Otherland Books in Berlin with my novel Red Team Blues.

When a giant company wrecks your life, what are you gonna do? They can afford more and better lawyers than you can, and they have people whose full time job is fighting off lawsuits — are you really gonna beat those people by pursuing your grievance as a side-hustle? Do you really wanna be a full-time, professional litigant?

For some people, the answer is yes: some people are angry enough, or sufficiently morally offended, to make suing a giant company their life’s mission. Sometimes, they succeed, and force companies to cough up gigantic sums of money. Obviously, this makes the plaintiff better off, but it can also make things better for the rest of us. Money talks and bullshit walks, and once it becomes clear that 300% of the profits from harming people will be sucked out of the company by a lawsuit, shareholders will revolt and force the company to clean up its act.

Shareholders don’t invest in companies that ruin our lives because they are committed to an ideology of cruelty. Ideology only gets you so far: the pursuit of profit incentivizes far worse conduct than mere sadism ever can:

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

Incentives matter. Companies above a certain size become too big to fail and too big to jail. They capture their regulators and ensure that any damages the government extracts are less than their profits — a fine is a price.

Juries, on the other hand, can and do really whack a company for its bad conduct. They understand that incentives matter. They understand that a company that saves $1,000,001 by cutting back on workplace safety can’t be driven to improve its behavior by a fine of $1,000,000 after it kills a bunch of workers. If profit outstrips penalties, penalties aren’t effective.

A dirty $1m profit needs to be met with a $100m judgment. As the Untouchables MBA teaches us, this is just sound business: “They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPZ6eaL3S2E

But suing these giant companies is hard. They can tie you up in court for years — decades, even. They can outspend and outwait you. The more profits a company has racked up through its evil deeds, the more claims it can fend off. Incentives matter, so if you’re gonna commit corporate murder, you’d better do a lot of it to build up the cash needed to scare off your victims and their survivors.

However: the bigger a company is, the more cash it has, the more money there is to extract from it if you can prevail in court. If the company has genuinely injured you, and if you can mobilize the capital and resources to pursue it to final judgment, there’s a huge payoff at the end of the process — and a lesson for all the other companies contemplating their own course of action.

That’s the Voltaire MBA: “you have to execute an admiral from time to time, in order to encourage the others.”

For hundreds of years, rich, powerful people have observed their colleagues’ abuses and thought, “They only pull that shit on peasants — but if they did it to me, I could sue them for everything!”

This led to an obvious course of action: strike a bargain with the mutilated, ruined peasants to finance their suit against the toff that so abused them, in exchange for a (large) share of the proceeds. Medieval courts called this champerty; today, we call it litigation finance: investing in other peoples’ grievances against deep-pocketed monsters, in the expectation of reaping huge cash payouts.

On paper, litigation finance seems like a neat solution to a messy problem. The bigger a company is, the worse the abuses it commits — and the more it can be made to pay for its sins. The normal economics of litigation are turned upside-down: rather than avoiding the largest companies, you pursue them. This is the Willie Sutton MBA: “That’s where the money is.”

Litigation finance is a large and growing chunk of the finance sector. For about a decade, hedge funds and private equity have been bankrolling law-firms that represent people who’ve been mangled by corporations, keeping the money flowing through whatever delays and entanglements the target throws up:

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/magazine/should-you-be-allowed-to-invest-in-a-lawsuit.html?smid=tw-share

Litigation finance can be thought of as the no-win/no-fee “ambulance chaser” business on steroids. While a local lawyer can make a tidy living going after slip-and-falls and fender-benders, splitting the proceeds with their clients, a firm backed by a huge investment fund can do the same to companies with billions in the bank and hundreds of millions on the line.

Litigation finance is also closely related to impact litigation, which is when a nonprofit uses charitably raised funds to chase corporations and governments through the courts to establish precedents that overturn bad laws or pave the way for future judgments. Impact litigation can be thought of as the trailblazer for litigation finance: for-profit lawsuits are risk averse and stick to pursuing cases that have a high likelihood of eventually succeeding, while impact litigators are a kind of legal entrepreneur, advancing new, uncertain legal theories in the hopes of making new law. Once that law is created, litigation finance can drum up thousands of similarly situated plaintiffs and sue tons of companies on the same theory, citing the new precedent.

Litigation finance’s first big scores was going after med-tech and pharma companies. A lax regulatory environment allowed medical companies to market deadly products that maimed or killed people wholesale — think Vioxx, vaginal meshes or metal-on-metal hip replacements (a doc about this, The Bleeding Edge, will give you persistent nightmares):

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

Suing the companies that killed your family or permanently disabled you is a slow and ugly process, but it’s a lot more certain than asking Congress to patch the loopholes the company that hurt you exploited, or hoping that a future President will appoint an agency head who gives a shit, and that the Senate will confirm them. And since money talks and bullshit walks, corporations that can’t pay dividends or do stock buybacks because they owe all their cash to their victims will suffer in the stock market, and their rivals will clean house and tread carefully.

Which brings me to the latest turn in litigation finance: climate litigation. As more and more money has sloshed into ESG funds that are supposed to make money by investing in ethical, climate-friendly businesses, the idea of suing giant oil companies and other wreckers has grown more attractive. 18 months ago, Businessweek covered the nascent-but-growing phenomenon:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/09/grievance-factory/#champerty

That growth has only continued. With more and larger ESG funds chasing returns, there’s a lot more money available to represent, say, poisoned indigenous people in the global south whose ancestral lands have been rendered an uninhabitable hellscape by a mining or petrochemical company. The returns from these cases aren’t correlated with wider economic trends: whether the market is up down, it makes no difference to the size of the judgment or settlement that is extracted in the end.

A new piece in the Financial Times by Camilla Hodgson does an excellent job rounding up the state of play in litigation finance, starting with the oil giant PTTEP paying $102m to 15,000 Indonesian farmers to settle claims stemming from a massive, ocean-killing oil spill in 2019:

https://www.ft.com/content/055ef9f4-5fb7-4746-bebd-7bfa00b20c82

The firm that financed the suit is Harbour Litigation Funding, and they paid for a lot of shoe-leather lawyering, sending reps on off-road motorbikes to each of the farmers’ plots to sign them up. The case cost more than $21m, and Harbour creamed $53.5m off the top of the settlement from PTTEP — about 40% of the total.

Those numbers are pretty compelling investment story: there aren’t a lot of opportunities to make a >100% return on a $21m investment in 15 years — let alone investments that let you claim to be bringing justice to poor farmers who’ve been abused by rapacious corporate murderers.

Other cases are still ongoing: mining giant BHP is facing a £36b class action case over the 2015 collapse of Brazil’s Fundão dam, which released poisoned mine-tailings into waterways serving millions of people. 700,000 plaintiffs are in the class, and the investors, Prisma Capital (Brazil) and North Wall Capital (UK) have already fronted £70m pursuing the case.

There is a vast inventory of cases like these, just lying around, waiting for someone to stake a claim. One barrier is that most of the world’s large law firms are conflicted out of pursuing these cases — they represent these same companies in other actions. But a new sector of specialized, un-conflicted firms is growing up, and tackling more and more of these cases.

These firms are chasing relatively easy claims, but there’s an even bigger fish out there, waiting to be caught: class actions against carbon-intensive companies, especially coal and oil companies, for their knowing contributions to the global climate emergency. These corporations are sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars, and they have inflicted trillions in harms. There’s gold in them thar wildfires.

The FT cites experts who predict a massive wave of litigation finance climate suits in the next 2–3 years, and notes an increasing tempo of shareholder motions demanding that big oil and mining companies disclose their litigation risks in their investor reports. This is a very compelling idea, a kaiju boss-fight in which we recruit monsters to fight other monsters. It’s such a fun idea that I actually wrote a novel about it, 2009’s Makers, in which corporate misconduct that has not yet reached the statute of limitations becomes the new oil, prompting a huge investment bubble:

https://craphound.com/category/makers/

But is the answer to a bad guy with a law firm a good guy with a law firm? There are certainly some ways this can go very wrong (many of which end up in Makers). Back in 2015, Cathy O’Neil published an excellent critique of litigation finance in the context of vaginal mesh cases:

https://mathbabe.org/2015/09/01/litigation-finance-a-terrible-idea/

O’Neill’s point is that incentives matter. The incentive for a litigation finance fund is to extract settlements, not win justice. Time and again, we’ve seen how a financial tactic can be severed from a societal strategy — like how GDP can be goosed to spectacular heights without improving national prosperity.

There’s even a name for this phenomenon: Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” The finance sector is spookily good at decoupling positive societal outcomes from positive investor outcomes. The real answer to medical companies that mutilate women with vaginal meshes, or destroy the planet with CO2, is criminal sanctions and regulation, not private lawsuits.

That said, I think there’s a case for the one leading to the other. Right now, climate wreckers devote very large sums to preventing effective action on climate. Suborning regulators and politicians all over the world isn’t cheap. If we take away the money they’ve saved up for this project through stonking, eye-watering judgments, and if we convince the capital markets not to give them any more money lest it be immediately extracted to pay for more redress of a litany of grievances, then perhaps we can deprive them of the capacity of corrupt our political process.

One way to understand whether something is a genuine threat to a company’s power is to look at how viciously the company attacks it. If you doubt that unions could do good for workers, just take a peep at the all-out violent blitzes that Amazon and Starbucks mount in the face of union drives. I mean, imagine if the Democratic Party took unions half as seriously as the GOP!

The corporate lobby exhibits the same terror over plaintiff-side lawsuits as it does over unions. A massive, decades-long campaign to villify plaintiff-side lawyers has convinced many of us that corporations are the victims of the legal system, rather than its masters. The PR campaign is surprisingly effective, despite its reliance on lies about the “McDonald’s hot coffee lawsuit” and other urban legends:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/12/hot-coffee/#mcgeico

Corporate plunderers are terrified of being dragged into court by their victims, and devote titanic amounts of blood and treasure into making it harder and harder to do so. On the “the more scared the are, the better” metric, litigation finance is a slam dunk.

But winning a case isn’t the same as getting a judgment or disciplining a firm. When Steven Donziger won a landmark judgment against Chevron on behalf of indigenous people whose lands and bodies had been permanently poisoned, the company struck back:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/02/free-steven-donziger/#free-donziger

Chevron bribed a judge in Ecuador to claim that Donziger had rigged the case, then brought a case in the US against Donziger for racketeering, judge-shopping to get judge Lewis A Kaplan on their case. Kaplan is a former tobacco industry lawyer who never met a corporate criminal he didn’t love, and when the SDNY prosecutor declined to press charges against Donziger because the case was absurd, Kaplan appointed a private lawyer — whose firm also acted for Chevron! — to act as prosecutor. The case against Donziger was obviously trumped up — the Ecuadoran judge who accused him of corruption later recanted and multiple countries’ Supreme Courts upheld the judgment Donziger won against Chevron. Nevertheless, Kaplan got Donziger locked up under house arrest for years, and even got him banged up in Riker’s for a time. Donziger’s lost his law license and his clients are still awaiting judgment.

This is the best law that money can buy, and Chevron has a lot of money. The massive expenditures needed to railroad Donizer were a pittance compared to the $9.5b judgment Chevron owed its victims in Ecuador.

The lesson of Donziger is that these companies won’t go genrly to their graves. They are enormously, unimaginably wealthy and act with the ruthlessness born of greed, which makes mere sadism pale by comparison. Litigation finance is exciting and promising, but it’s only a tactic — and it’s a tactic that’s always in danger of being turned against the goal it nominally serves. The people funding litigation finance don’t want to save the world — they just want to get rich. They can and will change sides if someone can make the business case for doing so.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/06/thats-where-the-money-is/#champerty

[Image ID: A mirrored office tower bearing the Exxon logo. One face of the office tower is a graffiti-covered ATM. Before the tower is a giant pile of bricks of oversized US $100 bills in paper wrappers. The ATM screen depicts a smouldering Deep Water Horizon oil platform.]

Image:

Flying Logos (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Over_$1,000,000_dollars_in_USD_$100_bill_stacks.png

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

 — 

Joe Shlabotnik (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/joeshlabotnik/2299501806/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[distractionactivated]

hey re that "wouldn't it be fucked up if my magic system did this" post, what's ur fav fucked up magic system idea(s)? c:

'Favourite' is a difficult one because I am constantly in a state of forgetting and remembering things lmao. But here's a couple that I've used, largely in games:

What if worlds were held together by powerful artifacts and breaking them broke the world a little bit and then an empress got the idea that if she broke one on purpose she could harness the power beyond and then she let in the interdimensional imperialists who broke all the artifacts and sucked worlds dry and then moved on, would that be fucked up or what.

What if the British government figured out how to weaponise [toff voice] the stiff upper lip and blitz spirit of the British people as a functional nuclear defence so siphoned off everyone's hopes and dreams and feelings in a delusional nightmare, would that be fucked up or what.*

What if light could be corrupt and the only safety is darkness, which turns out to be blood, would that be fucked up or what.

What if a vampire could kill you and you didn't notice for years would that be fucked up or what.

-

SORRY GOT DISTRACTED I OPENED MY TTRPG HOMEBREWS FOLDER AND WHEN DID I WRITE THIs

GAY TIGER ALLIANCE It’s the final year of high school, it’s nearly time for prom, and the whole Gay-Straight Alliance is very excited about it! You are going to make this experience absolutely perfect. Also, at least one of you is a tiger.* *the tiger is mostly very good at the shapeshifting magic that makes them look human. But only mostly.

*The least realistic part of this one is that the Reactive Emotional Nuclear Defence (or REND) didn't get cancelled for failing to provide value for money.

[mlmxreader]

Broken Soldiers | Alfie Solomons x m!reader

Anonymous asked: Alfie Solomons: Hello! We've come to the final request (for now). I hope you're able to get some inspiration and much needed rest, my friend ❤️! May I please humbly request of you something using the following prompts for Alfie Solomons X non-binary, male, or gn!Reader: "You promised that you would never leave me" + "Just close your eyes, it's alright."+ "It's not much, but it's… I'm sorry." Thank you so very much 🖤🖤! 🐍anon

summary: every man has guilt. you and Alfie aren't exempt from that.

tws: blood, violence, injury, swearing, shellshock

support your fanfic writers by reblogging what you read & enjoy

It was late when Alfie finally returned home, covered in blood from the neck down as if someone had put it on a paintbrush and flicked it his way, but he didn’t seem to phased by it, nor did he seem too phased by the hole in his shirt that was slowly spreading a dollop of red across his shirt and smearing it even more.

You knew Alfie’s business, you knew it could get bloody and gory, but you still felt guilty when you sat him at the kitchen table and stripped him of his shirt; he didn’t say much, which wasn’t like him, but he didn’t need to. You knew what he had done and where he had been.

You had been having issues with a man recently, someone you used to know well, someone you once called family. Someone who had betrayed you. You knew what Alfie had done without even needing to ask, to even think about it. Putting two and two together, you easily got four by mere instinct than anything else. As grateful as you were, you still felt guilty. It was your fault.

You couldn’t deny that when you poured the vodka on his wound, making him grunt and tilt his head back to expose the claw marks on the side of his neck where… where the traitorous bastard had fought back. Or tried to.

Alfie didn’t say much as you stitched up the wound, only soft grunts and reaching for the rum bottle. You pressed it into his hand, hoping it would at least help with the pain even a little bit. It usually did.

Rum wasn’t just for fun and fucking and fighting - it was good pain relief. He took a long swig, letting out a long and harsh breath before he allowed the bottle to rest on his thigh, holding it by the neck as he shook his head. 

“That fuckin’ cunt put up a fight,” he hissed, shaking his head. “I had to.”

You nodded, swallowing thickly. “Thank you.”

He glared at you, and dared to smile in an attempt to reassure you. “It’s not much, but it’s… I’m sorry he put you through that. Even more fuckin’ sorry I didn’t get the cunt sooner.”

You shook your head, resting your hand on his shoulder as you let out a soft sigh. “It’s more than enough… but I’m not done patching you up, I gotta chuck bandages on it, Alf.”

“Fuck.”

“Just close your eyes, it’s alright,” you told him gently, trying to be reassuring. “If you need it, I got a bit of wood you can bite down on.”

Alfie shook his head, grumbling and muttering to himself for a second. “No, no, it’s alright. As long as it’s you doin’ it and not some fuckin’ bellend posh toff.”

You couldn’t help but to laugh quietly, softly. More of a sharp exhale through your nose more than anything. “Alf, it’s only me and you here. You ain’t got much choice.”

“Yeah, well, you promised that you would never leave me,” he whispered hoarsely. “Can’t break it, now.”

You rolled your eyes, playfully patting his shoulder before you grabbed the bandages; it caused him great agony to lean forward to allow you to bandage the wound, even more agony to lean back again as he stared at the ceiling and sucked his bottom lip between his teeth. He was in so much fucking pain, but he didn’t want you to worry.

He never wanted you to worry, not after what he had been told by the doctor; shell shock, it was. Your nightmares, your episodes. Seeing things. Hearing things. Tasting and smelling gas. Convinced you were still fighting the war. Aversion to large crowds. Despising loud noises. Shell shock, the doctor had said after your first episode; you had nearly cut a man’s throat, convinced you were still fighting.

Since then, Alfie tried to worry you as little as he could. He still let you do the same old shit - you still sat in on meetings with him, you still offered advice when he asked when it came to business, you still acted as an extra gun when he needed it. Alfie loved you, as much as any man could love another, and he tried to look after you as best as he could because you did the same for him.

He didn’t know how the fuck he was meant to help your shell shock, but the doctors said to keep as many triggers and as much stress away from you as possible. Alfie wouldn’t have anything but the best for you; he got you the best doctor to look at you and check you out, he got you the best food and best drinks. Nothing but the best for his man.

Nothing but the best for his Lieutenant. Nothing but the best for the man who stood beside him when it came to everything; you stood to his left during the war, slightly behind him. You still did. 

“Alright,” you murmured, patting his shoulder again as you nodded curtly. “You’re all fixed, Cap’n.”

Alfie pulled you in for a gentle kiss, his way of saying thank you as it always was. “I still should’ve gotten to that cunt earlier.”

“We all got guilt,” you told him quietly, shaking your head. “I got as much as you do.”

“You can talk to me about it,” he said softly. “Y’know that, don’t you?”

You nodded, kissing his forehead sweetly. “I know. But you have to rest, Alfie. You’ve had a fucking shitshow of a night, and now you gotta come back to a broken soldier… you ought to rest.”

“I ain’t gettin’ any fuckin’ rest unless you come with me,” he told you plainly. “Fuck sleep. If you’re stayin’ up, so am I.”

You smiled, licking your lips as you sighed heavily. “I see your point. I’ll come to bed with you.”

“No backchat?”

“Not tonight, Sir,” you chuckled. “Too tired for it.”

[sweet-s0rr0w]

Tuesday WIP snip!

Ahhhh it has been an age! Thank you for the tags which go back to April and therefore which you won't remember, @wolfpants, @tackytigerfic, @teacup-tai, @corvuscrowned, @onbeinganangel, @graymatters, @oknowkiss, @katie-alden, @cavendishbutterfly. I've been almost dead on Tumblr recently, because I've been working on a very late anon fest fic, but now that's done (hallelujah) I thought I might share a little bit of what was going to be my Bodice Ripper Fest fic before I had to drop (SO EXCITED FOR THAT FEST!) I do plan on finishing this one, just can't do it in time. Silly AU featuring Lord Draco and magical dairy farmer Harry in a land dispute which may or may not feature a cow-milking scene and/or fucking in a barn.

***

“You may not be aware,” Draco said, adopting a rather more conciliatory tone than he might have used had he access to his wand, “but this –” he gestured expansively around himself, “–is Malfoy Manor.”

Unconcerned, the man took another careless bite, a trickle of juice running down to his chin. “Yeah…?” he said, not even bothering to swallow first, so that Draco caught a glimpse of the fruit’s golden flesh between his lips. Merlin, this was all most indelicate. Draco let out a little cough.

“And I,” he continued, drawing himself up as grandly as he could manage, given the unfortunate circumstances, “am Lord Malfoy.”

“Yeah, I know.”

It was clearly too much to hope for that this impertinent stranger might actually apologise, but even so, Draco had expected a slightly more appropriate response than he received. “Pardon me?”

“I mean, I supposed as much,” said the man, shrugging, “since you’re dressed like a toff, and you came out the house.”

“I – you–” Draco began (not spluttered, certainly not), but found himself rudely interrupted by one of the cows, who let out a long, low groan before Draco could deliver his appropriately witty rejoinder. As Draco watched, mouth agape, the enormous creature lumbered over to his mother’s prizewinning Flutterby bush, looked Draco dead in the eye, and began to defecate.

The sound of shit hitting foliage continued for an uncomfortably long time. Throughout it all, the stranger just stood there, sucking plum juice off his fingers, one eyebrow cocked as though daring Draco to speak.

Finally, the daft creature finished – not without passing wind, of course – and Draco, who was beginning to lose all feeling in his right arm from the weight of his stupid, useless gun, found he could bear it all no longer.

“Get those bloody great beasts off my land, right... right away!”

***

No pressure tagging all of the above, since it's been forever and a day, plus @the-starryknight, @getawayfox, @ghaniblue and @lqtraintracks <3 <3

[pepsi-maxwell]

12, 47 and 48

thank you <3

12. something i want right now

sling off. god fucking damn, i know i need it but i cannot wait until march 1st to use my arm again this SUCKS

putting the other two under the cut for tmi~

skfhfjfkd um. hmm. genuinely a tough question! it doesn't take much to get the engine going tbh; any of the following; sense of humour that gels with mine, ability to engage my degradation kink juuuuust the right amount, great tits (gender neutral), confidence, muscular arms, thick thighs, BODY HAIR, someone who could bench press me, men who are soaking wet, tight underwear thirst traps (something about being able to tell what someone's packing without seeing, i. yeah.)

47. turn ons

48. turn offs

way easier to list sjfjfkgn too much emotional neediness, being sexually attracted to me (i'm lithosexual, it's been a fun discovery), bad hygiene, negging, engaging my degradation kink eeeeever so slightly the wrong way, toffs and the upper classes, cocks/straps bigger than like 7"

[everythingcanadian]

Crisp Edges, Softened

Pairing: Jimmy Kent/Thomas Barrow (Downton Abbey)

Rating: G with suggestions.

No Warnings

Summary:

Day 1 of prompter: Crisp. A smoke break with quiet cues.

AO3 LINK

Smoke curls up from Thomas’s lips. The cold stings his eyes and bites at the tender skin he has to keep licking to stay wet and from cracking. His lungs ache with each inhale. The autumn air around him is crisp and sharp. Winter is closing in quicker than he likes. His hand will start to hurt more and for longer. Even though he has help now it still won’t calm the pain entirely. 

Speaking of help. Thomas can see from his place between the brick pillars as Jimmy escapes the throngs of the downstairs populace. The way the younger man upturns his coat collar to shield his neck from the cold. He has Thomas’s scarf on too, a nice dark grey pressing snugly against his throat. Thomas will kiss Jimmy later where the soft wool is now. Hoping to bring sounds from the younger man that are just as crisp in sound as the air is in Thomas’s body and nostrils.

Pale sunshine barely does its job to warm the air, only really shining a spotlight on their breath escaping them. It’s a nice reminder that they are both alive. Here together in a tiny space of time they save for each other. Thomas takes another deep breath and winces slightly as he feels it scrape down into him, filling him up and taking all the heat it can get before he exhales in a soppy sigh as Jimmy stops in front of him.

Jimmy’s smile is fuzzy and warm when he gives it to Thomas. Never needing to ask for a cigarette, Thomas opens his pack and hands one over. His hands shake a little as he flicks his lighter open and lights the stubby wick with a swift grind of flint and the small wheel. Those deep blue eyes look up at Thomas’s, leaning in and sucking in short bursts to help catch the paper on fire. 

Their hands are cold when they reach out for each other, Thomas with his cigarette in his mouth and Jimmy’s pinched between his middle and pointer finger of his right hand. They smile quietly between each other. They take the silence and mold it into precious few moments where the bite of the crisp air doesn’t penetrate their intermingling heat. Jimmy lets go first to shove his hand into his coat pocket, and to take a long drag and burn his lungs hot rather than cold. 

The smoldering tobacco between the pair of them softens the edges of the crisp autumn afternoon. Jimmy’s cheeky smile lightens Thomas’s mood that little bit more. Despite working for toffs, they have it pretty good. The hickies under Thomas’s uniform agree with his sentiment. As does the way Jimmy is looking at him with heat that will simmer under the surface until they are free for the evening after supper.

[the-woild-is-y-erster]

I'm going to bed soon, but I just want to say (as an adult that dropped outta college and then went back) that your education is not final. It's not be all end all.

It'll hurt for a while, everythin hurts for a bit, but either you'll tell her or you won't, and that's okay. Your choices are for you, and we all care about you man. You're not stupid for jus like? feelin feelins. All that shits totally normal and valid but you hafta stick with life nd with us or whoever you ends up spending life with. I can't help much nd I ain't gonna pretend I can (<- on the aroace spectrums) with the whole love thing, but jus know that it's ALWAYS better to write your thoughts out then keep em inside. That way you can come back later and look at them nd see your thought processes nd stuff. Or you can write em out nd delete it if that helps.

Life might suck right now, but it ain't gonna suck forever. The only way that it WILL suck forever is if it's cut short, so don't let that happen, y'know? If life tries to kick you down, throw mfing hands and take your time and get back up when you can. It don't matter when you do, just that you do at all.

I dunno. I dunno if this helps, but I'm jus tryin to say that you're not alone and youse cared about nd also jesus christ my typing style help god please not the newsies the infection (/lh). Stay safe man. - Jack

fuckyou im sobbing now/lh

i just

i grew up being taught that showing any emotion besides Happy or Neutral is Bad!™️ so its really difficult for me to like

deal with anything? because i was taught to push feelings down and stick it out, and my parents have made it all worse by never showing emotion either. i didnt see my dad cry in front of me until i was fourteen, and the only time ive seen my mom cry was when i got a bad grade, so its all fun and games here. and my pa is literally bashitbonkersoutthewazzoo. like he's a conservative (we live in the south us for context so its even Worse!) and he taught me to shoot a gun at the ripe age of three! and theres a gun in every room and he's a. he reveres ben shapiro and jesse kelly and those guys, and i spent the entire quarantine listening to him talk abt how the election was faked and how covid was either fake or brought by the chinese (he couldnt decide) and hes severly racist!!! yippee!!/s so feelings arent a big thing in my house.

added onto the fact that i was raised christian? the first time i looked at a girl differently, or the first time i realized how uncomfortable i was jn my own body was horrifying to me. im atheist (ish? it's complicated) now so it doesnt matter to me, but i still have all that internalized crap abt liking her.

and i have severe pain in both of my knees like literally 24/7 and ive had it for YEAAARS but my ma didnt believe me until super recently and so i only just got an appointment with an orthopedic doctor! because the first general doctor told me i was faking it<3

and!!!!!!! the real fukcing kicker!!!! my parents have blatantly refused to pay for my education!!!!!!! like outright and several times!!!!!! only because i wanna get my bachelors in fine arts in theater!!!! they said it was a stupid degree and that i would get nowhere<3 so ive got that ahead of me too. and the last time i got a bad grade, i got grounded for two months. and it was a 79.5 on a minor quiz.

so we have fun here.

but i have all these plans!!! and dreams!!!! and places i want to go to and food i want to eat and languages i wanna learn!!! so i know that i'm not gonna off myself, but sometimes.

sometimes it seems reaaaally tempting.

but i really genuinely appreciate you, and riff, and toff, and dave, because you guys are so much nicer and more sympathetic than anyone i know irl.

so like.

love you/p <3

[neo-shitty]

hehe about that post on what kind of blog you are!

i always see you on my dash when you’re raving about some book, or i’m guessing anime…? idk it’s some sort of media i reckon

and i’m always like “i should keep this in mind and check it out since toff says such nice things about it”

it’s either that or all your nct dream fics that i save in my drafts oahsjshsjshjs i shall get to them eventually AHAHHAHAHA

oh and!! the rare occasion where you reblog nct gifs. idk you’re one of the two people who are my mutuals and reblog dreamies content and i really appreciate it 🥰

i'm so sorry i got to this so late?? this got buried in my notifications and i do suck at remembering that there is an ask inbox on the tumblr app 🤕

i always think that i'm not visible on dashboards !! also yes, this blog has turned into a book-anime-writing dump. all means of segregation i wanted to do, out the window. thank you for kinda trusting my opinion regarding the things i share?? i don't think it's everyone's cup of tea (or should i say, cup of ti haha sorry) but if you do end up liking any of it, please feel free to let me know.

haha my nct dream fics 🧍🏽you don't have to but if you do, let me know. honestly, i write nct fics better than my skz ones w/c i should stop doing bc it feels like i'm talking to the void w/ the lack of interaction HJAHS help two mutuals 😭 i will always be up to reblogging dreamies content (even though it's mostly haechan, but still!) thank you for this and i apologize for the late response!!

[devouringyourson]

I don’t think it’s a dumb argument? literally if you’re rich enough to be involved in the arts on a creative level at all and make a living off of it you’re on my shit list? sorry I love movies etc as much as anyone else but on a practical level? all of those people suck

I'm not disagreeing? I think he's also a privelleged toff but i think there's a massive difference between him and the kind of historical upper class he seeks out and found that interesting lol there's interesting things to be said in the greyscale it's allowed

[frostbeees]

lolololololol. the nhl instagram account just posted "Coffee + Cole Caufield = a good time for Tyler Toffoli". llike??? NHL write the fanfics themselves!!

you mean this?!

bc between that and this from the other day:

i have many questions

[astrologista]

just 4 future reference... this is my opinion of kristoph gavin in case theres any questions about any further kristoph posting on here lmao

[rinnysmuses]

[a potato]

[georgiapeach30513]

okay what if princess has been insecure lately, and just so happens to be punished by curtis and ari to watch them have sex. but princess couldn’t take it and said toffe bits because it was too much. both daddies will have a long talk w princess and aftercare. angts and fluff pleaseeee

These three!! LP in the beginning had a hard time being fully honest with them and even herself. So when she fully got comfortable with knowing they would stop immediately, and could trust them, it made life in the bedroom so much easier. And we all know she HATES not being included with them. She doesn't mind not participating, as long as she can freely touch.

🖤🖤🖤🖤

Just the Two of You

Summary:  Ari and Curtis punish you, but you feel some type of way

Pairings:  Ari X Reader X Curtis

Rating:  angst

Warnings:  insecurities after pregnancy, 18+ ONLY

Word Count:  700

Desperate Lives AU Masterlist

Ari & Curtis Masterlist

“Princess, what do you have to say for yourself?” Ari asks, tightening your binds before walking over the the waiting Curtis.  You turn away from them in defiance.  Not ready to look at either one while their hands roam over each other’s bodies.  You can hear their mouths sucking and nipping on each other, and you refuse to look.  Hate watching when you can’t touch them.

Hate when they refuse to hook a vibe under you, so you get something out of it, but no.  You’re being punished because of them.  You had gotten a bit of an attitude because of them.  You had given birth to triplets.  Your body had changed because of them.  The way you’re feeling is because of them.

Going out as a family, and they get ogled, while everyone looks at you confused, it’s all because of them.  And now they’re taking something from you, enjoyment of touch.  Using your need to touch them while they make love, against you.  And everything is their fault. 

You take one look at them, and they’re not even paying attention to you.  Wondering if you all had been fooling yourselves.  It was always just them, and now you’re getting in the way, and you’re ready to just leave and let them have their fun and love together.  “Toffee bits,” your voice whines, breathless, and tears form at your eyes, it’s Ari that hears the word first, but it’s Curtis that notices the tears, he stops, looking back at you, and he’s jumping to cut you loose.

The two of them going over to free you from your confines, while your tears don’t quit.  You don’t even want to look at them anymore.  When Ari tries to wrap an arm around you, you jerk back, crying.  Curtis coming from the other side and still you back off, “No!  Don’t touch me.”

“Little One, what’s wrong?”

“You two,” they look you over, and you just go towards the door.  It’s too late to figure things out right now, but you’ll give them the bed.

“Hey, can you explain, Princess?  You know this was just teasing fun.”

“It’s not fun to me.  It’s like you don’t even want to touch me,” Curtis’ face softens as he tilts his head towards you.  “Stop, don’t pity me.  I gave you your babies, and now...”

“You’re still beautiful, Little One.  We still love you, still want you in our relationship.  All of you.”

“You tied me up.”

“You were being a brat,” Ari reminds you.

“Because of you.  My body suffered carrying your massive children, and now I look like this, and you still look like gods.  It’s not fair.  And then you want me to watch, and you know I want to touch you, I don’t care if you don’t want to have sex with me, but you could let me touch you.  I need you.”

“Princess, is that what you think?  We don’t want to have sex with you?  Just let us know when this becomes too much, at any point.  Hey, c’mere,” Ari’s beefy arms wrap around you tightly followed by Curtis’.

“We’re in this together.  I’m sorry if we’ve made you feel undesirable, Little One.  You after pregnancy is the sexiest I’ve seen you,” you try and wiggle out of their grasp, but they hold you tight.  “I’m serious.  Seeing you transform from our little to the mother of our babies, my god, do you know how hard it was for me to not want to hump you everyday?”

“Or when you feed one of our babies, and your finger gently runs over their face.  I’m jealous of our children.  So can we just...snuggle with you tonight?  Just be in the moment with each other okay?”

“You don’t want to be just the two of you?”

“That doesn’t sound like a life worth living Little One.  Let’s get in the bed, I’m going to paint your body with my lips.”

Masterlist