#Top Hustles In 2021

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The CFPB is genuinely making America better, and they're going HARD

On June 20, I'm keynoting the LOCUS AWARDS in OAKLAND.

Let's take a sec here and notice something genuinely great happening in the US government: the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau's stunning, unbroken streak of major, muscular victories over the forces of corporate corruption, with the backing of the Supreme Court (yes, that Supreme Court), and which is only speeding up!

A little background. The CFPB was created in 2010. It was Elizabeth Warren's brainchild, an institution that was supposed to regulate finance from the perspective of the American public, not the American finance sector. Rather than fighting to "stabilize" the financial sector (the mission that led to Obama taking his advisor Timothy Geithner's advice to permit the foreclosure crisis to continue in order to "foam the runways" for the banks), the Bureau would fight to defend us from bankers.

The CFPB got off to a rocky start, with challenges to the unique system of long-term leadership appointments meant to depoliticize the office, as well as the sudden resignation of its inaugural boss, who broke his promise to see his term through in order to launch an unsuccessful bid for political office.

But after the 2020 election, the Bureau came into its own, when Biden poached Rohit Chopra from the FTC and put him in charge. Chopra went on a tear, taking on landlords who violated the covid eviction moratorium:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cfpb

Then banning payday lenders' scummiest tactics:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/29/planned-obsolescence/#academic-fraud

Then striking at one of fintech's most predatory grifts, the "earned wage access" hustle:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/01/usury/#tech-exceptionalism

Then closing the loophole that let credit reporting bureaus (like Equifax, who doxed every single American in a spectacular 2019 breach) avoid regulation by creating data brokerage divisions and claiming they weren't part of the regulated activity of credit reporting:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/16/the-second-best-time-is-now/#the-point-of-a-system-is-what-it-does

Chopra went on to promise to ban data-brokers altogether:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/13/goulash/#material-misstatement

Then he banned comparison shopping sites where you go to find the best bank accounts and credit cards from accepting bribes and putting more expensive options at the top of the list. Instead, he's requiring banks to send the CFPB regular, accurate lists of all their charges, and standing up a federal operated comparison shopping site that gives only accurate and honest rankings. Finally, he's made an interoperability rule requiring banks to let you transfer to another institution with one click, just like you change phone carriers. That means you can search an honest site to find the best deal on your banking, and then, with a single click, transfer your accounts, your account history, your payees, and all your other banking data to that new bank:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/let-my-dollars-go/#personal-financial-data-rights

Somewhere in there, big business got scared. They cooked up a legal theory declaring the CFPB's funding mechanism to be unconstitutional and got the case fast-tracked to the Supreme Court, in a bid to put Chopra and the CFPB permanently out of business. Instead, the Supremes – these Supremes! – upheld the CFPB's funding mechanism in a 7-2 ruling:

https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/05/supreme-court-lets-cfpb-funding-stand/

That ruling was a starter pistol for Chopra and the Bureau. Maybe it seemed like they were taking big swings before, but it turns out all that was just a warmup. Last week on The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner rounded up all the stuff the Bureau is kicking off:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-06-07-window-on-corporate-deceptions/

First: regulating Buy Now, Pay Later companies (think: Klarna) as credit-card companies, with all the requirements for disclosure and interest rate caps dictated by the Truth In Lending Act:

https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2024/06/cfpb-applies-credit-card-rules

Next: creating a registry of habitual corporate criminals. This rogues gallery will make it harder for other agencies – like the DOJ – and state Attorneys General to offer bullshit "delayed prosecution agreements" to companies that compulsively rip us off:

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-creates-registry-to-detect-corporate-repeat-offenders/

Then there's the rule against "fine print deception" – which is when the fine print in a contract lies to you about your rights, like when a mortgage lender forces you waive a right you can't actually waive, or car lenders that make you waive your bankruptcy rights, which, again, you can't waive:

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-warns-against-deception-in-contract-fine-print/

As Kuttner writes, the common thread running through all these orders is that they ban deceptive practices – they make it illegal for companies to steal from us by lying to us. Especially in these dying days of class action suits – rapidly becoming obsolete thanks to "mandatory arbitration waivers" that make you sign away your right to join a class action – agencies like the CFPB are our only hope of punishing companies that lie to us to steal from us.

There's a lot of bad stuff going on in the world right now, and much of it – including an active genocide – is coming from the Biden White House.

But there are people in the Biden Administration who care about the American people and who are effective and committed fighters who have our back. What's more, they're winning. That doesn't make all the bad news go away, but sometimes it feels good to take a moment and take the W.

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/2024/06/10/getting-things-done/#deliverism

[kitsuga]

Windborne Dance. {Venti x Reader}

Description: 

A fic in which Venti and reader dance away their feelings; takes place during Windblume festival. 

───── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ─────

Tags: mostly fluff, slight angst but just in like. one little part i promise, drinking (it is venti after all), takes place during a windblume festival, reader is NOT mc/lumine/aether!, not beta'd, not edited, gender neutral reader, genshin impact x reader, venti x reader, genshin impact, venti

Word Count: 1,005

A/N: Written on: May 14, 2021 

I didn’t mean for the slight angst I really didn’t but it came to me as I wrote it at like 2 am and was like ‘hm well damn, toss it IN’ so, my bad, sorry sorry (only slightly) 

───── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ─────

As was natural in Mondstadt, the breeze was gentle and constant, bringing fresh air and freedom along with it. 

With the festivities in full bloom, the flowers joined in as well; petals danced about in the air, spinning and lunging in the most graceful of ways. The entire city was decorated from top to bottom with flowers, pinwheels, and colourful banners while the sounds of the bards' songs and the citizen’s laughter echoed off the building-- all paying homage to the Windblume Festival for a certain archon—the one who happened to be sitting across from (Y/n) at an outside table to one of the taverns. 

“Another glass!” 

“You’ve already had 9, Venti.” 

“Make it 10!” 

His giggle was as airy as the wind he controlled, throwing his arms into the air to stretch against the back of his chair. Aqua green eyes scanned the crowd nearby, a smile plastered to his face. (Y/n) sat back with their arms crossed to their chest, their eyes closed and a small smile on their lips. The two of them enjoyed one another's company in the opposite of silence.  

There was no such thing as quiet in Mondstadt, especially during a festival. As the two of them sat close to the center of town, the music was the loudest among sounds, overpowering the normal hustle and bustle of the locals and those running around enjoying their time. (Y/n) let the music wash over them; an upbeat melody with an undertone of something longing—they felt like it may have been written just for them. They heard Venti call out to them, only minorly interrupting their peace to ask if they’d like another drink as well. They could barely muster enough energy to give him a dismissive wave; they heard him mutter something along the lines of it being their loss.  

Unbeknownst to them, his eyes left the crowd and made their way to their form. They looked so relaxed, serene; the perfect picture of what Venti wanted to provide the world, and what he wanted in the world. He never expected to feel this way in general let alone with one of the most beautiful people he’s ever had the pleasure of meeting; he expected to simply just admire them, enjoy the fact that their soul was so... genuine. However, freedom is as freedom does, and he found himself by their side in no time, easily finding himself unexplainably smitten. 

Venti stood up; his half-finished drink already long forgotten as he made his way closer to them, standing in front of them with a large smile on his face, simply waiting for them to notice—he knew it wouldn’t be long. 

“You’re blocking the light,” they whined, begrudgingly opening one eye to peek at him, “I was enjoying that. Almost took a nap.” 

“You’re like a cat.”  

“Are you gonna start sneezing?” 

“No.” He scrunched his nose, sniffed a little, and lied. “Come on,” Venti held out one of his hands, the smile now returning to his face, “dance with me!” 

“Here?” He had their full attention now as they sat up and looked at him, “In front of all these people?” 

“No one’s paying attention! They’re all dancing with their loved ones too; it’ll be fine!” 

Grabbing onto their wrist, he effortlessly pulled them to their feet, facing them and swiftly moving backwards towards the dancing crowd and upbeat music. His giggle was hardly heard above the sound surrounding them. 

“Loved ones?” Their comment fell on deaf ears. 

Venti was simply enjoying his time; bouncing about, holding (Y/n)’s hands and swinging them around, spinning them in circles only to playfully pull them close and dip them dramatically to get a reaction from them—he only responded in a loud laugh. After a bit of time, (Y/n) loosened up, no longer caring about the people who surrounded them and focused only on the aqua green eyes and bubbly smile in front of them. 

The sun started to dip below the rooftops, eventually making its way past the horizon as well. Normally, time would never really matter to Venti, but with (Y/n) so close to him-- aware of how warm they were within his arms and how tired and sluggish their movements had become—the reality of his situation kicked in. His arms won’t be warm forever. 

Eventually, he’ll lose it all; the sound of their laugh, the shine of their smile, the way they made his heart sing. He lost something special once—though it was a different love—and knowing it was going to happen again was something he always knew would happen, but never made the thought any easier. He simply wanted to stay just like this; his arms around them as they couldn’t help but fall asleep with their head on his shoulder, softly swaying to the music that had carried as gently as the breeze, the odd feeling of his heart getting ready to leap out of his throat. The wind will always die down, but it still had strength behind it; his sign to let go of worries and live in the moment. 

A soft smile and an equally soft kiss to the side of their head, he whispered to the wind he called a friend. 

“I wish we could stay like this forever; you know?” uncharacteristically somber for him, though his tone quickly changed, “But we can’t. So, let me tell you today that I love you.”  

Silence fell upon the two of them again; (Y/n) tightened their grip on his shirt while Venti’s eyes grew wide, not expecting them to have heard him. They moved closer, nuzzling their face against his shoulder to hide their embarrassment, and he let out another giggle that tore through his body. In an attempt to lighten the mood, Venti pulled away, moving his hold to their wrists and swung their arms back and forth, absolutely beaming at them before uttering the words that gained an exasperated sigh and laugh from (Y/n). 

“Time for another drink!” 

[queen-of-the-avengers]

His Healer

Pairing: Mob!Loki Laufeyson x Nurse!Reader

Word Count: ~1.7k

Warnings: fixing an injured loki, mentions of al capone, fluff mostly

Summary: Your paying job is working as a nurse in a local hospital. Your side hustle is being a doctor for the mob boss, Loki.

Squares Filled: 1920s au (2021) for @lokibingo

Author’s Note: any and all comments are appreciated <3

x

“Alright, Mr. Sanchez. How do you feel this morning?” you ask as you pull back the hospital curtain.

“Better now that I get to see you.”

“Keep talking like this and your wife is gonna think you have a girlfriend,” you say.

“We wouldn’t want that, would we?” he chuckles.

You grab your stethoscope and place it over his heart to listen to it. Next, you check his pulse and blood pressure. His pulse is a bit high but with the medication he’s taking, it’s not surprising. His vitals are looking strong for someone who had hip surgery, and you write them on the paper chart you have hanging off the end of his bed.

“Keep this up, Mr. Sanchez. You’ll be running marathons in no time.”

“I hope so, dear,” he smiles.

“Okay, time to get those muscles moving. I’d like to see you make it to the couch this time.”

“I’ll try.”

You help the older man sit up in his bed when your coworker comes into the room.

“Y/N? There’s a call for you. I can take over.”

“Okay, Mr. Sanchez. Elizabeth is the best besides me, of course,” you wink playfully. “You’re in good hands.” You leave Elizabeth and Mr. Sanchez alone while you head to the phone that’s on the wall. There is a receiver and a transmitter connected to the base of the phone. Both ends are on tubes that you can move around so you’re not stuck to the wall. You place the receiver to your mouth and the transmitter to your ear. “This is Y/N.”

“899 E Logan Boulevard. The boss needs you.”

“I’m at work. You can’t just--”

“The boss needs you.”

“Repeat the address, please,” you sigh. You set the receiver down and keep the transmitter to your ear while you write down the address. You pick up the receiver when you want to talk to him. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

You hang up both ends of the phone and find your boss who is filling out paperwork at the desk.

“Mary, I have a private client who news me right now. Elizabeth is covering for my patients. May I leave? I’ll come back once I’m done.”

“Yes. Make sure you follow up with Elizabeth about your patients.”

“Of course.”

You leave the hospital and to the car that the boss gifted you. He’s always giving you presents for your services on top of the money he pays you. You’re not sure where he’s staying, so you grab your navigation watch to put in the address you were given. This watch has saved you in more ways than one when you’ve gotten lost in the bustling city of Chicago.

The map is where the face of the watch would normally be found. The direction of the maps is wound around small wooden pegs like scrolls that could be switched out of the wristband depending on the route needed to go. You take out the map you were using before and put in the new one. Once you’re ready to go, you head toward the house.

Well, mansion is a more accurate description. Take away the hedges and big trees, this place looks like half the size of the hospital you work at. There is a steel gate at the front of the property with two armed guards standing outside of it. They’re immediately put on alert as soon as you pull up but you’re not afraid of their big guns.

“State your business,” one of the guards says in a deep voice.

“I’m the doctor for the boss.”

He nods to the other guard who opens the gate for you. You drive down the long driveway to the front of the house where half a dozen guards with guns are posted outside of it. Even if you’ve never been here before, you’ve always had to have a guard lead you through whatever place the boss is staying in. You get out and grab your medical bag from the back.

“Right this way, ma’am,” one of the guards says.

If you thought the outside was heavily guarded, then the inside is just ridiculous. More than two dozen guards are keeping watch or just wandering around protecting the place. You should get used to this because you get dozens of calls a week from the boss. This place is just beautiful and you’d love to live here if it were crawling with guards.

The floor is marble, the walls are dark grey, there are lights on the black walls that give them some kind of light, the archways are high with chandeliers coming down from the high ceiling, and the windows stretch higher than you can reach. It makes sense why the boss would live in a mansion like this. The guard takes you to a room with two guards posted outside of it, and one of them opens the door for you.

There on the bed lies the boss, Loki Laufeyson. The blankets have been stripped from the bed so he’s only lying on the black sheets that are stained with his blood for sure. He has an enormous gash starting from the top of his chest down to his hip. There is a towel covering the area that is dark red, and you don’t think it was that color when he placed it there.

Loki is well known across all of Chicago as one do the deadliest mafia bosses. He works very closely with Al Capone which is why he gets injured all the damn time. Loki found you in a bar one time with a deep cut on his cheek. You told him how to best take care of it without scarring since he has such a pretty face.

If you knew who he was before you talked to him, you wouldn’t have done it.

He took a liking to you and always came to you whenever he had even the smallest of injuries. You’re the only one who caught his attention so he wanted you around him as much as possible no matter the reason. The more you took care of him, the more your feelings for him grew. You’re not going to tell him that, of course. It would only go to his head.

Seeing him in so much pain breaks your heart.

“What did I tell you about getting into fights?” you ask and approach the side of the bed.

“I need to take care of business, love,” he laughs but groans in pain.

The bed is low enough to the ground so that when you pull up a chair next to it and sit down, you’re at the perfect height to fix his wound. You peel back the towel to see what you’re working with and more blood comes rushing out.

“It would be better if you were in a hospital with equipment and blood.”

“You know why I can’t go there.”

“You’re bleeding all over your bed.”

“I’ll get a new one,” he shrugs.

This isn’t going to be pleasant but the wound needs to be cleaned. You have a water bottle that will be used to flush out the wound while gauze will be used to clean the edges. You gently pat the area around the wound to clean the blood up and Loki closes his eyes in pain. Once you’re satisfied, you take the water bottle and begin flushing the wound.

“Fuck!” Loki shouts.

“If you can handle getting a wound like this, you can handle a bit of water. Stay still.”

When you’re done with that, you grab new gauze and pack it inside the wound so blood doesn’t spill over. There is a numbing cream that you use to spread on the outside of the wound because you need to stitch the wound so it can have a chance to heal.

“This is gonna hurt,” you state. “Even with the cream.”

“As you said, I can handle it,” he chuckles.

You take the needle and stick it through one side of the wound and thread it to the other side of the wound. You pull it close and tie it multiple times before cutting it. One down, many more to go.

“You know, this is gonna scar.”

“Good. It’ll give me some character when I’m handling business.”

As you’re stitching the wound closed, you notice his bare skin on display for you to see. It’s so pale. It’s like he hates going outside and getting some sun.

“You’re so pale. Getting some sun every once in a while isn’t gonna kill you.”

“Yes ma’am,” he drawls. A blush makes it way up your neck and to your cheeks at his accent. “I’ll go outside if you come with me.”

“I’ve already told you why I can’t,” you whisper.

Loki turns his head away from you and coughs causing more blood to rush out of his wound. When he turns his head back, his hair has fallen over his eyes. You reach up and move his hair away without touching his skin.

“I’ll change for you.”

“Al Capone will let no one go. You know this.”

It doesn’t take long for you to stitch the whole wound shut, and you use your water bottle to clean the site from his blood. You grab some more gauze and lay it over the entire wound and a big bandage that you lay over it to give it another layer of protection.

“I hate seeing you like this, Loki,” you sigh.

“I’ll try better next time,” he promises. “Thank you for being such a great doctor.”

A smile breaks through which makes him smile.

“I took time out of my very busy day to be here. How will you ever compensate me?”

Loki reaches up and grabs your neck gently and pulls you down to him. He slants his lips against yours and gives you a kiss that takes your breath away. This isn’t the first kiss you’ve shared with him and it certainly won’t be the last.

“I’ll have one of my men pay you most graciously, love,” Loki whispers against your lips.

You have to get back to the hospital so you pull away from him and gather your medical supplies. You put your hand on the doorknob but don’t turn it yet.

“Don’t get into any more fights, Loki.”

“How will I ever see you if I’m not injured?”

“You know where I live,” you smile. “All you need to do is knock.”

x

Follow my library blog @aqueenslibrary​​​​ where I reblog all my stories, so you can put notifications on there without the extra stuff :)

[chromegnomes]

Blister Blight, the game I've been part of the art team for since 2021, is finally ready to go public and is now live on kickstarter!

The buzzword-laden way I've described it in marketing materials is "story-rich 8-bit action-platformer that fuses classic run-and-gun side-scrolling gameplay with a branching story reminiscent of modern roleplaying games," but this is tumblr, so I'd like to say what I really mean by that:

Did you ever play Mega Man X when you were growing up? Do you remember how cool it was to discover that the order you beat the levels in had unexpected effects on the remaining levels, like how defeating Chill Penguin made it so that Flame Mammoth's stage was all frozen over so there wasn't as much lava? Blister Blight is a game built from the ground up around that experience.

I am incredibly proud of the work we've been able to do with after-hours hustle on whatever time and energy we have left over from our day jobs, and we're officially ready to make it our top priority. Being able to work on games full time would be an absolute dream come true for me, and I really can't imagine how much cooler we'll be able to make this game when we can truly focus on it.

I'll be posting more about the game and my contributions for it for the rest of the month, but in the meantime you can try the demo for yourself and see what I mean! It's free on our itch.io page for now, and I'll update this post when Steam gives the green light to take it public there, too.

If you like what you see, or want to learn more, please check out our Kickstarter page and consider backing the game. I think we have something really special here.

[offthewoptunes]

OFFTHEWOP TUNES

Founded by FreshDuzIt in 2020, OFFTHEWOP is more than just a record label—it’s a movement.

NLE CHOPPA X FRESHDUZIT - CAMELOT (5x Platinum 2024)

Video directed by lyrical lemonade

FRESHDUZIT ON GENIUS EXPLAINING HOW TO STRATEGIZE

CAMELOT (Remix)

INDYSTAR NEWSPAPER: "Indianapolis’ Trailblazing Trap Producer: First to Hit Radio and Achieve Platinum Status!"

OFFTHEWOP/SONY ATV

FRESHDUZIT SIGNS SONGWRITER ADMIN

As a Sony songwriter since 2021, OFFTHEWOP is a leading voice in emerging Trap Music, Art, and the culture that drives it. OFFTHEWOP is dedicated to showcasing raw talent, combining street authenticity with innovative storytelling. Our mission extends beyond signing artists; we’re creating a universe where real artists achieve legendary status. With extensive experience working as A&Rs for various labels, we’re now ready to partner with the industry’s best.

OFFTHEWOP is a phrase that carries multiple meanings, embodying the hustle and grind. It’s synonymous with "off the muscle" or "off the strength," representing hard work and determination. It also nods to "off the block," symbolizing how we’ve transitioned from the streets to the industry, while still making money from the block. Additionally, it can mean "off the phone," highlighting the digital hustle. And with "wop" being old slang for a lot of money, OFFTHEWOP is all about turning hustle into wealth.

OFFTHEWOP ALBUM:

The *Off The Wop* album racked up millions of views across all platforms, including SoundCloud, Spotify, and Apple Music. This 14-track project cruises through the city streets of Indianapolis to Memphis, featuring guest verses from Duke Deuce and Paper Route Empire's rising star, Paper Route Woo.

Activated NLTOworld.com with merch drop

Exclusive FreshDuzIt Beats: download link

OFFTHEWOP PLAYLIST:

The OFFTHEWOP playlist is a collection of hits from OFFTHEWOP, OFFTHEWOP3D & 4k, that define the sound of the streets. Featuring tracks with and from heavyweights like NLE Choppa, Yo Gotti, Babyface Ray, Veeze, and more, this playlist is packed with bangers.

Logo redesign by FRESHDUZIT

NUMERO UNO: OFFTHEWOP’s ANIMATED HARE

MUSIC VIDEO: EPISODE 1 TURTLES VS THE HARE

written by FreshDuzIt

Directed by Myles Hi

Premiered on HipHopDx:

"FRESHDUZIT x Numero Uno: VVS Pendant"

We need help with funding animation, game development, creative direction, access to advanced technology, marketing toys based on Numero Uno, ensuring they resonate with fans and become a key part of the brand’s merchandise lineup and a strong marketing campaign to ensure the game's success.

Animation Production

Storyboarding. Full animation production (episodes, shorts, etc.)

Comic Book Creation

Scriptwriting and story development

Artwork and illustration. Printing and distribution

Marketing and Promotion

Social media campaigns and content creation

Public relations and media outreach, Advertising materials for both music and comic

Merchandise

Production of apparel, accessories, and collectibles

Distribution and retail costs

Creative Development

Additional content such as animated shorts and special comic editions. Interactive content (e.g., apps or games)

Distribution

Integration with digital platforms for comics and promotional content. Promotion and logistics for comic and merchandise distribution

Legal and Licensing

Intellectual property protection for the character and content

Contract negotiations and legal fees

Team Salaries for animators, comic artists, marketing professionals, and other key roles

[route22ny]

Life as a 21st-Century Trucker

Technology, corporate greed, and supply-chain chaos are transforming life behind the wheel of a big rig. I went on the road to find exactly how.

by Andrew Kay

1 When Jay LeRette preaches the Word, he transforms from a mild Midwesterner—one who loves country gospel, rides a horse he has trained to roll over and grin, and has, himself, a whinnying laugh—into a human incandescence. Sixty-four, 5' 5", and dressed like a cowboy, he increases in stature; his voice crescendos to cracking. “The devil’s learned to use us and abuse us, to beat the snot out of us,” he says, then uppercuts the air. “Amen, Chuck?” A man in the second row with a great, ZZ Top–like beard croaks amen. “The devil mopped the floor with me,” LeRette continues, and mimes a janitorial sweep. “But God—but God!—” he shrieks, pounding the lectern and leaping, “—had compassion on you and I.”

It’s a weeknight in December 2021, getting toward Christmas, and I’m sitting in the trailer of an 18-wheeler that’s been repurposed into LeRette’s chapel. It’s parked, permanently, at the Petro Travel Center, a truck stop off Interstate 39 in northern Illinois. All around it are acres of commercial trucks, stopped for the night and carrying every kind of cargo: cows, weed, pro-wrestling rings, grain, petroleum. One side of LeRette’s trailer reads “Transport for Christ"; beside it, a neon cross gleams in the dark. John 3:16 adorns the back end: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Next to the scripture are two godly hands cradling a truck.

All across Illinois there are tornado warnings. Menacing gales rip through the parking lot, making the trailer shift and groan; we are beyond the reach of any siren. Yet every minute, the door opens and a new trucker walks in. Each takes his place in one of about 20 chairs arranged in rows toward the middle of the chapel, which is pretty minimalist: framed Bible verses along wood-paneled walls, a lectern at the front, an office and bed in back.

The drivers—all men tonight—have come straight from the road, and their bodies suggest the slow entropy wrought by bad food and decades of sitting. All but one appear over 50. Some know each other: When LeRette kicked off the service by belting out hymns and strumming his guitar, a straggler entered, and several men called out, “Rip!” Rip hustled in and high-fived or hugged them.

LeRette hands out copies of the King James Bible and asks us to open to Luke 10:25. Chuck seems to be back in Exodus, and when LeRette repeats “the Gospel of Luke,” Chuck responds, “Oh, I thought you said Mötley Crüe.” They are irrepressibly funny like this, suddenly schoolboys.

LeRette asks John, a small, older man in a hoodie, to read the verse. “A certain lawyer stood up and tempted him, saying, ‘Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?’” He struggles to sound out “eternal,” but the men nod along, supportive, patient.

Then LeRette interprets: A skeptic is trying to trick Jesus into contradicting Judaic law, into uttering a heresy. “Now how many know he ain’t gonna do that? Jesus is the living word of God, amen? There ain’t no trapping our savior.” Chuck calls out, “They tried to trap him for three years,” and LeRette answers, “C’mon, that’s right!” The quickness with which he beckons these road-weary men into call-and-response is extraordinary. He stamps and claps, sidesteps and kicks till his lungs falter. “Jesus carries our load, amen?”

After the sermon, John says meekly, “I have a pain in my shoulder. Would you try healing it?” LeRette agrees and hurries past us to his office, returning with a vial of frankincense. He approaches John and daubs his forehead, then places a hand on his ailing shoulder and calls out: “Father, we pray against whatever it is that’s trying to come against John.” The other drivers rise, surrounding and placing their hands on John or kneeling before him where he sits, eyes closed with one hand lifted upward. He awakens under their touch, smiling serenely.

Each trucker gets a turn at the center of the group. Then they turn toward me.

“Andrew, may I anoint you?” LeRette asks. There’s no time to think, so I say,

“You may,” and straightaway he applies the oil to my forehead.

“Just flood through him, oh God, like liquid fire,” he intones.

Then he starts speaking in tongues, a tumble of manic syllables he lets fly while the long-haulers encircle and lay hands on me.

“Father, I commit Andrew to your care,” LeRette concludes.

2

I have come here on a strange sort of mission: I want to find out what’s gone awry in American trucking. For more than a decade, freight-haulers have been held up as the poster children of a supposedly inexorable fate: 2 to 3 million drivers out of a workforce of 3.5 million—one of the largest in the US—are slated to be sidelined by AI. Yet recent years have hardly borne out that doomy prophecy: The self-driving industry has been humbled by fatal crashes, scandals, a federal investigation, a pedestrian death, negligent homicide charges, and stillborn business promises. Meanwhile the pandemic has wreaked havoc on our supply chains and made us more dependent on truckers than ever—more beholden to an industry that, for all its hugeness, still can’t keep pace with our needs. It’s an industry that dwarfs all other forms of domestic freight transport: 72.2 percent of the total tonnage of goods shipped within the US is moved by truck (air transport moves less than one-tenth of 1 percent). Investors—inspired, doubtless, by the shipping delays and logistical breakdowns that threaten to upend the economy—have sought furiously to augment or outright replace that workforce, pouring money with redoubled fervor into automation since 2020. But they have found scant success: What we have, ironically, is a nationwide shortage of the very workers alleged to face obsolescence.

What’s behind that shortage? And how exactly is technology altering life inside the cab? I want to know why 90 percent of the people who enter this profession quit within the first year; why a red-pilled faction of its members—affronted by a vaccine mandate that was, one senses, only the last in a litany of grievances—formed the Freedom Convoy and People’s Convoy last winter and spring, blocking border crossings between the US and Canada. I hope to understand, too, how the relatively few truckers who stick around sustain themselves: the myths they live on and the shrines to which they come, parched, to be replenished and raised up.

Shadowing LeRette, a holy therapist whose vantage point on this world is at once intimate and panoramic, I hope to glimpse some answers. Then, because I need to see the road for myself—need to be in a truck—I’ve arranged to ride shotgun with a person named Jason Childs, a 41-year-old trucker and adventurer I’ve never met but with whom I’ve very sensibly agreed to share a cab on a two-day route to Boston.

The day after my anointing, LeRette and I head to the main building of the truck stop, where showers, slot machines, and a diner are. He’s decked out in a big parabola of a cowboy hat, a custom black Carhartt jacket that reads “Victory in Jesus,” Wrangler-ish denim, and dark-brown cowboy boots. He approaches the PA system to advertise tonight’s service, which begins at 7 pm, then we grab a booth at the Iron Skillet, where he runs through his personal history over lunch.

As a young man, LeRette was such a wayward punk that he lowers his voice recounting it all. He stole things (“I liked motorcycles”), fist-fought, and assaulted police; he drifted from detention hall to drug ward to psychiatric hospital. At last, he went to prison for theft. One night toward the end of his yearlong sentence, he sat alone in his cell, thumbing through a Bible and crying; he wanted to be delivered, wanted to climb clear of the devilry that had devoured his early life. In the darkness, he became aware of something—a preternatural light. Some being or intelligence that he instantly identified as the Holy Ghost had come to dwell with him. He stopped struggling, felt clean and clear-headed, drained of the defiant energy that had twisted him crosswise with the world. At 6 am, he showed up for breakfast looking serene. “What’s got into you, LeRette?” other inmates asked. “I found Jesus,” he said. They responded: “Brother, you need him!”

He started converting other prisoners, and upon release, began evangelizing in the prisons, jails, and detention centers he knew so well. He made a name for himself bringing the gospel to the most hostile of places, a perilous early ministry that he recalls with what sometimes seems like preacherly embellishment. In Chicago one night, he claims, someone held a gun to his forehead and pulled the trigger. He raised his arms to the sky and cried, “Jesus!” only to discover that the chamber had been empty. Another time, LeRette says, leaning in, while he was witnessing to a crowd of bikers at a Hell’s Angels bar in Rockford, he saw they were getting blow jobs as he spoke. He lifted his eyes and went on preaching.

LeRette supported himself as a mechanic at a Del Monte Foods factory, where he met his wife, Karen. One day in 1991 he got a call from an investor who was planning to build a new truck stop in Rochelle. He wanted to install a chapel there and appoint LeRette as its preacher. LeRette was dubious. He thought his calling was to be a prison chaplain—and besides, the lot was little more than an expanse of corn at the time. But the investor convinced him that if they built on this blankness of prairie, the truckers would come.

The chapel was furnished by a nondenominational ministry—Transport for Christ, now TFC Global—founded in 1951 to serve an industry that was booming thanks to the highway system. The name, like so much about LeRette’s world—its mingled grotesquerie and humor, its wild manifestations of grace amid grimness—seems drawn from Flannery O’Connor. Today, the ministry’s sanctified semis are stationed across the country. The souls LeRette encounters—thousands of truckers come to him each year—include regulars who pass through weekly, plus others he sees once and never again. They provide LeRette’s income in the form of donations, slipped into a box at the chapel or sent by mail. Some truckers have been donating monthly since the chapel opened.

LeRette lives with his wife in a farmhouse half an hour south of Rochelle. “I could never be a truck driver,” he concedes. “Too much of a homeboy.” But some nights he crashes on a couch in the chapel office. Once, he was rocketed from sleep at 4 am by a pounding at the door. “Get up, preacher,” said a voice. “You’re going to meet your maker.” LeRette opened the door and saw an enormous man who’d come to the chapel the night before. “I hate everything about you,” the guy said. “Your voice, your looks.” He seemed poised to murder LeRette when another driver entered—a jacked ex-bouncer who perceived the emergency and rushed forth, demanding the intruder back off. The three talked of Jesus until sunup, when the first guy broke down, agreeing to be born again.

This, LeRette says, is common: A trucker will come at him with a rage that turns out to conceal a desperate desire for forgiveness and love. “I think if there’s one word to describe the trucking industry and the drivers, it would be lonely,” he tells me. They are on the road for weeks, sometimes months, at a time. If they have partners or children, they carry the guilt of missing date nights and soccer games. If they fight with their spouses, they relive the spat numberless times on the road, the work itself becoming a brute metaphor for the emotional freight they carry.

In this sense, LeRette has become the prison chaplain he felt called to be. If trucking was once a lifestyle of freedom, it is increasingly one of deranging captivity and surveillance. During the week I spent at the Petro stop, drivers fumed to me about the electronic logs they must now use—tablet-shaped devices mounted on their dashboards that monitor everything they do: all their driving time, their fueling up, their loading and unloading, their napping. This particular digital intrusion is the result of federal legislation. A law passed in 2012 dictates that truckers work a maximum 14-hour workday, spending no more than 11 hours behind the wheel with three hours of rest time. If they violate this law, they risk being yanked from the road and fined, and might mess up their carrier’s safety rating, which could deter customers, creditors, and insurers. Many drivers concede that the time restrictions arose in response to reckless behavior. “Back in the day they used to do lines of coke off the freakin’ dashboard,” one Illinois-based driver recalled. That, he explained, is how one got to New Jersey overnight. Still, the truckers I spoke to would rather decide for themselves when they’re tired.

The newer trucks are so computerized that they provide what might be termed “AI helicopter parenting”: a development supposedly meant to increase safety and fuel efficiency, but also, I’ll come to suspect, a compensation for fast-tracking newcomers through training and into driver’s seats before they’re ready. Each state-of-the-art Peterbilt in the Petro lot is equipped with at least 10 computers that govern everything from steering to braking, reducing many truckers to what are known in the industry as zombified “steering-wheel holders.” The AI alerts a dispatcher if anything aberrant happens—an abrupt stop, a missed turn—and if a driver changes lanes suddenly, the truck will defy him, jerking itself back. (The driver can override this function, but many truckers say it remains disruptive, even dangerous.)

Then there are the cameras. Ascending the cabin of one semi, I see a black gadget affixed to the windshield like an old-school GPS, its lens trained on the driver’s seat. Such cameras protect companies from liability in the event of an accident—they can prove that a driver wasn’t acting irresponsibly and thus isn’t at fault—but truckers deplore them. “Some drivers,” LeRette says, “tell me they’ve got cameras pointed back in the sleeper.”

On a thriving Reddit community called r/Truckers, which hosts more than 100,000 members, one popular post begins, “Hello, fellow piss jug enthusiasts,” and goes on to complain that its author’s employer has announced it will start implementing driver-facing cameras. Hundreds of users chime in to say that they’ve quit for this reason. “I’ll only accept a driver-facing camera,” one comments, “if the company owner gives me a 24/7 unrestricted stream into his house.”

3

LeRette pays the bill and I follow him to the door. We pass a towering driver at the buffet. LeRette stops, invites him to the evening service, and asks where he stands with Jesus. “I tried to read the Bible cover to cover last year,” the man says. “But I got this phone in my pocket—it got a demon in it. Takes me to sites I don’t wanna go.” He claps me on the shoulder and bursts out laughing, and LeRette hurries off.

I decide to stick around, turning back toward the duskily lit dining room. The clientele is a microcosm of the workforce to which it belongs: older, racially diverse, overwhelmingly male. Of the 3.5 million people who work as truck drivers in the US, 75 percent are over 40, roughly 40 percent are not white, and at most 10 percent are women.

An ambient antisocial quiet hangs in the air: The e-logs and Covid, I’ll learn, have strangled the camaraderie that once flourished at these places where truckers would hobnob heedless of mandated resting and driving intervals. Most drivers sit alone, scrolling on their phones or glancing at the Fox News that drones on the TVs. Vacant booths are marked with a libertarian poutiness: “Due to the IL governor’s orders, this booth is closed.”

At one table, though, three men sit together laughing. I blunder up, introducing myself, and they invite me to sit. Their names are Junius (“JuJu”) Silas, Eric Brown, and Nick Rains; they haul equipment for big touring acts. They’re the drivers of the WWE trucks parked beside the chapel: Throughout my visit, because of the trailers’ adjacent rear ends, André the Giant’s likeness sits beside John 3:16.

I ask them why the industry has a 90 percent attrition rate within the first year. All instantly respond: “No money.” They describe a predatory apprenticeship system that conspires against new drivers seeking to enter the profession. The industry is made up of thousands of mostly small-fleet owners—95 percent of them with 20 trucks or fewer—but dominated by about two dozen giant companies that serve as its gatekeepers. These megacarriers often house schools where some 400,000 new truckers receive commercial driver’s licenses annually. The companies entice people with promises of financial plenty, even as they ensnare them in “training contracts”—binding agreements that require them to drive for the company at below-market wages for a year in exchange for training or else be hit with an exorbitant fee for that training, to be paid off at high interest. Many drivers stick around for the full year to avoid those fees, enduring what amounts to debt peonage.

Silas, a slyly charismatic man with graying dreadlocks, tells me: “The average pay per mile for a fresh driver—your shoes still on? 26 cents.” Actually, he notes, you make half that, “because you’ve got a split seat”—meaning it’s common for companies to pair new drivers in a truck, where they take turns at the wheel and split their earnings. “It don’t make child support,” Silas says. “It don’t make electric bill,” Brown says. “You don’t have a girlfriend,” Silas adds.

To make matters worse, drivers who leave their training contracts early risk being blackballed by the carriers. This past summer and fall, the US Department of Justice oversaw a high-profile antitrust lawsuit in which several truckers sued nine megacarriers for colluding with one another not to hire them. In November, they reached a $2.1 million preliminary settlement.

Freight companies have been warning lately about a trucker shortage so dire that it’s causing supply-chain and delivery delays nationwide. But drivers like Rains see such warnings as disingenuous, given the way megacarriers treat new drivers: “Like cattle.” What’s more, the DOJ has said that the blackballing of drivers who break training contracts may be contributing to the shortage. According to the American Trucking Associations’ 2019 driver shortage report, there are now nearly three commercial driver’s license holders for every job that requires one in the US: strange stats to square with a shortage.

All day I ambush drivers who greet me with an annoyed suspicion that gives way to a thirst for talk so desperate that within minutes I couldn’t shut them up if I tried. I buy them coffee, soon finding myself at the center of small congregations of truckers who’ve shifted seats to join. They want me to understand that freight companies talk up the shortage because they’re angling for federal and state grant money to subsidize the cost of training new drivers. They say that taxpayers are unwittingly funding the turnover that enables this deception to continue—providing what Todd Spencer from the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association calls “corporate welfare” to companies that can seem ripe for treatment by Upton Sinclair. Last year, Rains received a payout from the carrier CRST, where he got his commercial license, after it had reached a settlement with drivers who’d filed a multimillion-dollar class action against it for lying about “free” training, overcharging them for schooling, and failing to pay them minimum wage. The same company saw 150 to 200 sexual harassment claims filed by student drivers against their trainers in 2018 and 2019; one woman alleged her trainer raped her, only to be told by CRST that without video footage they could do nothing. They charged her $9,000 for her training and effectively fired her in retaliation. She sued the carrier and received a $5 million settlement in 2021.

LeRette’s sermon the night before (“The devil’s learned to use us and abuse us!”) starts to strike me as an allegory about a more worldly, if faceless, kind of fiend. “The trucker shortage is propaganda,” insists 62-year-old Jerry Adams, who hauls flour, records country music, and claims to have dated one of Dolly Parton’s sisters. (Adams says she once called the chapel mid-service and sang to the truckers on speaker.) For him, the politicians who keep rewarding the megacarriers bear ultimate responsibility. Many drivers agree, blaming their mistreatment not just on corporate avarice but also on Washington. In 1980, the Motor Carrier Act deregulated trucking, making it easier to get a commercial driver’s license but also making the job far less remunerative. “The worst thing they ever did was deregulate it,” says Dean Martin, who began driving in 1994. “What I made when I started … I make less now.”

Adding insult to injury, truckers are barred from overtime pay by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, even though most of them work at least 70 hours a week—especially when you figure in the obligatory rest periods imposed by Congress in 2012. (A bill called the Guaranteeing Overtime for Truckers Act, sponsored by several senior Democratic US senators, is making its way through Congress.) The average US trucker salary in 1980, adjusting for inflation, was $110,000; today the median is $48,310. This despite research by industry experts like Daniel Rodríguez showing that the probability of truck crashes indirectly correlates with pay and experience, plummeting among long-standing, well-compensated drivers.

According to the American Trucking Associations, though, the trucker shortage is quite real—the product of an aging workforce, the industry’s struggle to recruit women, and the ballooning of freight volumes thanks to our rapacity as consumers. All this, exacerbated by Covid, has created a tight labor market in which fleet owners—primarily small outfits with a handful of trucks—are fiercely competing for the same limited pool of drivers. They are doing so by increasing their pay rates (up by as much as 25 percent since 2019) and enticing truckers with five-figure signing bonuses. Jeremy Kirkpatrick, a spokesperson for the ATA, stressed to me that many truckers are now regularly moving from one signing bonus to the next in a game of musical chairs that leaves fleet owners frustrated. “This churn, or poaching, is what really inflates the turnover rate,” he said.

It’s possible to reconcile these rival accounts: Scummy treatment of apprentice drivers is leading to massive hemorrhaging at the entry level and thus to a shrunken labor force that innumerable fleet owners must strenuously fight over. It’s a landscape akin to academia, the world I came from, where a great share of grubby work is done by an insecure class of entry-level laborers—grad students, adjuncts—striving desperately to join a small, cosseted class—the tenured—who enjoy clout, protections, and a lifelong career trajectory.

While the pandemic’s supply chain woes raged, venture capitalists funneled more investments into autonomous-truck startups—$11 billion from 2019 through 2021—adding fresh precariousness to a trade already beset with uncertainty. These investments have coincided with a rush of optimism among engineers and lawmakers alike. In August, US House representatives, fired by a conviction that “this technology is moving so quickly,” formed a bipartisan “autonomous vehicle caucus” aimed at “establishing the right policy conditions to increase the use of AVs.” “It’s closer than you might think,” Dmitri Dolgov, the co-CEO of leading AV company Waymo, wrote of a self-driving future last month. “Freight volumes will increase, demonstrating how AVs could help untangle supply chains and backfill the immense shortage of truck drivers.”

And yet when one looks closely, this boldness is everywhere haunted by doubt—a rooster-strutting that never quite convinces. One leading autonomous-truck startup, TuSimple, executed its first entirely driverless truck run in Arizona while I was at the Petro stop. An 80-mile nocturnal drive from Tucson to Phoenix, it was hailed as a success—but tellingly, a lead vehicle drove five miles ahead of the truck, scouting for obstacles, while an escort, ready to intervene, trailed it closely, and law enforcement vehicles stalked it from half a mile behind. In 2020, TuSimple struck a deal with Navistar to engineer autonomous trucks; the companies secured about 7,000 orders, and the trucks were scheduled to enter production in 2024. Last December, though, they severed their partnership. A rival, Aurora Innovation, told me in March 2022 that it was aiming for the end of 2023; it has since pushed this date to the end of 2024 and even mulled the possibility of a sale to Apple or Microsoft. In fact, there is little consensus about not just when but whether self-driving trucks will actually come. Truckers tend to bristle at the suggestion that an unmanned digitized truck could perform their job; they point to the dexterity involved in backing into a tight space, even as engineers maintain that this is what autonomous trucks do best—a mere matter of physics and geometry. For their part, researchers like Maury Gittleman and Kristen Monaco at the US Bureau of Labor Statistics stress how truckers’ jobs include more than just driving; they’re tasked with loading and unloading, customer service, and addressing the manifold safety concerns that arise on the road—all duties that “are less susceptible to automation.” Even among engineers, there’s little agreement about the viability of autonomous trucks. Anthony Levandowski, the cofounder of Google’s self-driving vehicle division and now CEO of the autonomous-truck company Pronto, told me he thinks the technology has reached an impasse owing to the trucks’ inability to “understand the world”—to anticipate and react to sudden, spontaneous occurrences such as a driver cutting them off. So the timeline remains uncertain: “Is it five years or 50?” Levandowski asks without an answer. Meanwhile, companies like TuSimple (which refused to talk to me) depict themselves as motivated by a noble desire to devise a solution to the punishment and peril of trucking. The logic, apparently, is that they will relieve an immiserated workforce by rendering it obsolete.

Afternoon at the Skillet bleeds into evening. Every so often a robot voice issues through a loudspeaker: The shower is vacant, the next ticket number is up.

A portrait sharpens into focus of a job that entails both mortal danger and wilting tedium. On one hand, truckers navigate vehicles that weigh up to 80,000 pounds down an interstate system swarming with civilian drivers cutting trucks off and fooling around with phones—and they do so knowing it will take them three football fields to stop should the need arise. From an accident investigator on Reddit, I learn of a trucker who was cut off on a wet road by a driver going 80 mph. The car lost control and skidded sideways into the truck’s path. The trucker could only watch as the car’s driver looked up at him aghast while his wife covered her head, and he barreled straight into them, killing the man instantly and leaving his wife a quadriplegic. The trucker never recovered psychologically: “I just couldn’t get the truck to stop.”

On the other hand, US truckers spend great swaths of their lives waiting at warehouses for their trailers to be loaded and unloaded. Of the 11 hours they’re allotted each day for driving, they spend an average of four and a half idling in line. “They talk about a truck-driver shortage,” one driver tells me. “Yet there are drivers sitting in warehouses two miles from here with an appointment from six or seven hours ago,” he says bitterly. “If they can tell me when I can eat and when I can take a nap, how come they can’t tell these people loading and unloading these trucks that they have a set amount of time to do it?”

Such bitterness helped ignite the Freedom Convoy and People’s Convoy. Ostensibly a transnational uprising against pandemic restrictions—one bolstered by money from far-right groups—the convoys were also an outcry against the perceived collusion of Big Tech and the government against blue-collar workers. Some of the convoys’ participants have passed through LeRette’s chapel. “They’re not against vaccination,” he tells me. “They’re against the government taking complete control over them.” Which sounds like a generic right-wing rallying cry, but it holds special significance for truckers, who feel they’re regulated in all the wrong ways: forsaken where they need help, oppressively monitored where they yearn for liberty.

4

Ascending the chapel steps around 7:15, I open the door and find a seventysomething man seated across from LeRette, mid-narrative. Haggard, cadaverous in color, he has a raving giddiness about him and takes no notice of me. “I got home, walked into the kitchen, and there she was, waving a gun in my face,” he’s saying.

I piece together his story: He came home from a trucking route and found his girlfriend, Norma, demanding at gunpoint to be done with him. He turned and ran downstairs, intending to flee the house. “I got halfway down the steps,” he says, “and she shot a hole in the wall above my head.” When he finally crept back upstairs, “She was on her hands and knees crying.”

The man’s name is Don, and it’s clear he’s likely withholding details. She filed a restraining order; he pressed charges. They’re awaiting a court date.

One by one, truckers file in for the service, and, grasping that something is underway, stay hushed and sit, watching. “Are you a born-again Christian?” LeRette asks.

Don instantly grows defensive. He’s a lapsed Catholic. “I could pull quotes out of the Bible that would put down any preacher if you contradict what I say,” he dares LeRette. “Over half the Bible wasn’t inspired by God; it was influenced by man.”

They clash on this at length, and LeRette finally bursts. “You know what you’re doing, sir? Hey! You’re living an ungodly lifestyle. You’re fornicating with this woman. You come in here with a filthy mouth and you say, ‘Where’s God in my life?’ Man, you need to repent and say, ‘God, I’m in the wrong! Forgive me and fill me with your Holy Spirit!’” LeRette stares at him beseechingly.

Don stands his ground, battling tears: “Her and I stood on a hill and looked at each other as the sun rose! That’s the way we were married! We are married in the eyes of God.”

More argument. Then LeRette says: “Jesus wept. You know that, right?” Don nods. “All of a sudden I’m experiencing feelings, and I never did before.” Later, he adds: “I don’t want to be alone.”

LeRette, seizing the opportunity, jumps up, fetches a Bible, and thrusts it into Don’s hands. He implores him to read aloud a verse from Ezekiel. Don fishes trifocals out of his jacket. “‘A new heart also will I give you,’” he pronounces, “‘and a new spirit will I put within you.’”

“Do you want that?” asks LeRette, standing before him. “Do you want God to take away that stony heart of yours and set His spirit inside you?”

He wants Don to consent to being born again here, now, and implores him to “Yoke up with Jesus!” But Don won’t submit. He keeps dodging, refusing, changing the subject.

A driver from Louisiana named Tony, bass-voiced and built like a bullfrog, pipes in, telling of his own divorce, how he lived out of his pickup in a Walmart parking lot during the worst of it. “I had to concentrate on me,” he realized.

A group therapy session materializes: The other drivers, pivoting toward the secular vocabulary of Oprah and Dr. Phil, urge Don to prioritize self-care, while LeRette sits by, looking sidelined and a little glum.

At last LeRette intervenes. “Don, I have no greater desire in my heart tonight than to see you say, ‘Lord Jesus, I need you. I want to be born again. I want you to renew me.’”

“No.”

Instead, Don joins hands with the other drivers and leads them in prayer. “Lord, I’m asking that we can find a peaceful solution to this situation I’m in. That I can get a lot of help from the people that have listened to me. That we can get help for Norma and bring her back to the woman I fell in love with. Bring her back to the light.”

5

I stay late in the chapel, talking to the truckers. They recall driving during the earliest days of Covid—the apocalyptic emptiness of the roads. “Everything shut down but us,” says Tony. “It felt like we were in a movie. Five o’clock, rush hour in Atlanta, and I’m running 65. I got chill-bumps on my arms talking about it.” A suddenly homebound public relied on them more than ever, yet they themselves remained unprovided for; truck stops, restaurants—all were closed. “They locked it down, man. You’d be lucky if you got a honeybun.”

“Back when Covid started we were heroes,” one driver says. “Now it’s right back to pre-Covid; we’re just POSes.” Another calls out, “Boy, it sure was nice while it lasted!”

An intimacy takes shape in the trailer among drivers who, as early as 2 am, will be back on the road, scattered to their separate lives. It’s as if we’re drovers gathered around a campfire—a metaphor with a powerful gravitational pull here. LeRette doesn’t just dress like a cowboy. His office is laden with cowboy paraphernalia: a cowboy kneeling before a cross, a holster, a rodeo poster, photos of LeRette on horseback shooting at targets, and an ornamental cowboy boot beside the vial of frankincense, a juxtaposition that neatly captures LeRette and the faith he’s plying—call it Cowboy Pentecostalism. Cowboyism, it turns out, is an essential piece of the trucker mythos, for many drivers a life-giving faith unto itself. As Jane Stern showed in her 1975 book on the industry, Trucker: A Portrait of the Last American Cowboy, the conviction that they’re heirs to the cattle-drivers of the frontier, peripatetic dudes who answer to no one, is their central animating story.

This is a core reason why truckers find the cameras and computers so galling: More than any projected future of self-driving trucks, these technologies threaten not just their livelihoods but their innermost sense of self. To watch LeRette in action is to see a ritualized resistance to that threat—a refusal through sacrament, through touch, of what many see as a coordinated push by Silicon Valley, government, and their employers to wring trucking of its human element.

I spend my last day talking to more truckers, conversations that range from damning to poignant. There’s the African American woman, a long-hauler who declines to share her name, who tells me: “Companies are treating drivers like meat in the seat. It’s all about them. They’re not concerned about what the drivers need.” By which she means, especially, time off, but also pay. There’s Janet, perhaps 70 years old, who talks to me from high up in her truck while her three spaniels peer around her at me. She drove for decades with her husband; a year ago he died. “It’s tested my faith,” she admits, and clutches my hand.

That night I have a last dinner with LeRette, thanking him for everything. I tell him, feigning poise, that in the morning I’ll catch that ride to Boston with Jason Childs. I share what little I’ve heard about him: Though recently engaged, Childs has 11 kids by 10 different women scattered about the country. “Oh, mercy!” LeRette shrieks, and prays for me over his pilaf.

When I get back to my hotel room, I see that Childs has texted me. “Well they changed my trip,” he wrote. “Going to the Everglades.”

6

In the morning I make my way south, by Greyhound, to a lot outside Springfield where I’ve arranged to meet Childs. In time a truck pulls up; out of it hops a middle-aged man in a hoodie—medium height, bearded, with a lone earring and a faintly roguish air. He holds out a hand, smiling: “Welcome to central fuckin’ Illinois.”

We embark on the route—me, Childs, and his 11-year-old soon-to-be stepson J. D., who wants to be a trucker himself and, in his spare time, plays a trucking video game on Xbox whose object is to make sensational deliveries in brutal weather. I’m in the passenger seat, J. D.’s in the sleeper cabin, divided from the main cab by a curtain through which he peers happily. Childs’ truck is a flatbed with a removable tarp that protects our cargo: 38,000 pounds of cornmeal destined for a tortilla-chip factory in LaBelle, Florida. It’s the first of three deliveries that Childs—who works for an independent contractor with 50 trucks—will make, a journey of five days, 120 hours, for which he’ll get 31 percent of the total cut: $1,100 for the first drop, plus smaller sums for the next two.

The e-log ticking, we head down Route 24 toward Kentucky. It’s arresting, being up here: To be lifeguard-high in a 35-ton machine screaming down the highway at 80 mph, to see so plainly every driver’s phone-fiddling, their eating and knee-steering, is a sensation of godlike omniscience. But it is also terrifying.

There is a moment-to-moment proximity to death, not just your own but everyone else’s around you, that gives fresh clarity to all I witnessed at the chapel—the reconciling with God of people forced into a daily awareness of endings. “I’ll die in a truck,” Childs says casually, explaining that this is every trucker’s deepest fear. “A buddy of mine had a heart attack in a semi, right up here at that last exit. His heart exploded and he lost control of his truck, and he went right into a hotel.”

At one point we find ourselves on a county road, where a truck passes us on a double line. A moment of dread ensues: There’s oncoming traffic, and since it’s far too late for us to stop, we can only watch as the driver lays on the throttle, hurtling forward and, just in time, merging back over to avert disaster.

At times, Childs’ anxiety crests in moments of rage so over the top they teeter into black comedy. “I have panic attacks,” he says. “That’s why I drink.” Sure enough, when we cross into Kentucky, daylight wanes and we get stuck behind a semi doing 50 in the fast lane. Childs seethes—we’re on the clock—and when the driver finally changes lanes he speeds up alongside him, flips on the cab light and lowers my window. “Stupid-ass Ichabod Crane-looking motherfucker!” he yells. I glance over and see a gangly man at the wheel, his own window down, utterly bewildered. “This is why I love him!” J. D. cries.

Childs is a Byronic character, a bruised antihero whose story is harrowing enough to merit a trigger warning. “I was sexually molested by a lady,” he tells me once J. D. has fallen asleep. “She beat me with a taser. You can see my shoulders are all fried.” He peels down his hoodie, baring a cartography of scars. “I’ve never been genuinely loved.” Abandoned by his biological parents, he cycled through foster homes and psychiatric hospitals, quickly developing the sex addiction that has shaped his life. He’s had north of 300 partners, many encountered on the road—in whose arms, he tells me, blithely Freudian, he has found the semblance of maternal love. Nearly a dozen kids have come into the world, and with them mountains of child support that dwarf his earnings. Of late he has found stability with his fiancée, Stephanie. He smirks: “I’m retired.”

Jason Childs may be an unreformed Jay LeRette—the preacher minus the jail-cell epiphany, still adrift in a tumult of rages, unhelped by grace. And yet Childs, too, is ignited by faith—that same mythic cowboyism that forms the other half of LeRette’s creed. “We’re the guys that go in the saloon and play cards back in the Old West. And these,” he says, gesturing at his truck, “are our horses.” In keeping with that mythos, he insists on driving a manual transmission—“It gives me greater control, and it saves lives every day”—and has elected to work for a boss who doesn’t use driver-facing cameras. He despises the new generation of drivers who have everything done for them by computers, including the teenage truckers who, thanks to a controversial new federal apprenticeship program aimed at combating the shortage, may soon be eligible to do interstate hauling. All the same, he angrily, defensively waves away my suggestion that the job may be automated out of existence: “You’re never going to get rid of the real truck driver.”

As evening deepens, we advance into southern Tennessee, past mountain silhouettes that in darkness loom like cenotaphs. “Automation will be the death of the cowboy,” Childs suddenly says, a different authority in his voice. “All truck drivers fear it, because we know it’s going to take our jobs away. We’ve heard this for years … But it can’t be,” he insists.

“I know safety is key to this,” he concedes, and in his tone there’s a curious fatalism at odds with his earlier indignant dismissal of a driverless future. “The American truck driver—think about how many songs, stories. ‘Smokey and the Bandit.’ All the country songs. Legends were born out here.” He searches for the right word. “The folklore of a trucker—it’s the cowboy culture, the outlaw. The big, long beards and the big bellies. Disheveled. Stinky. Then there’s me,” he laughs, “who looks like I’m going to rob a bank.”

“Now the actual truck driver is going to go extinct. And it’s all about saving money. That’s all it’s about.”

7

We barrel through Georgia, crossing into Florida around 2 am, when the e-log mandates that we stop for 10 hours. An odd suspense follows: The 14-hour workday is running out, so we scan the highway for a truck stop with both vacant space and a restaurant, but the combination proves elusive. We settle for a travel station with available parking but only a convenience mart. Childs clambers into the sleeper cabin with J. D., and crashes.

I shut my eyes briefly, but by dawn I’m awake and get out to stretch. My lower back is throbbing, my right sacroiliac staging a violent coup that’s spreading down my leg. I think of Childs’ frenzied philandering through the years and find it impossible to imagine any amount of sensuality surviving this life. I feel the least attractive, and furthest from horny, I’ve ever been.

I hobble across the road onto what’s almost certainly someone’s property, entering a different world of palmettos, steroidal pinecones, and migrated cranes that swim the air. After Rochelle, this feels like my own stolen sabbath. I stoop and photograph. When I amble back to the truck, I pass Childs and J. D., who are headed to the mart to get breakfast. Childs nods slightly.

I crawl into the sleeper and draw the curtain, and after a time hear them return; Childs is on the phone with Stephanie. “He’s finally asleep, thank Christ. I saw him walking back to the lot from some random fucking field. Like, y’all know this is serial killer central, right?” He switches to what I can only describe as some kind of strangled Big Bird voice: “Deh, I’m gonna get myself killed by Jeffrey Dahmer!” J. D. squeals.

All that day we scud southward, the sky sunless and menacing. Florida is a hallucination of Confederate flags and Waffle Houses. “Worst state in the union,” Childs says. He’s chain-smoking now, five an hour; I watch him distance-parent on the phone half the day while operating the rig. “She’s testing you, Maddy, she’s testing you!” he shouts into the Bluetooth speaker at one point.

At nightfall we hit LaBelle. The tortilla-chip factory is desolate; there’s no sign they’re expecting us—no instructions, not a soul about, and, it turns out, no clear way to the loading dock in the back. Cars are parked carelessly about the building, their noses impinging on the path to the dock. There are no overhead lights, so Childs must slalom backward in the dark, maneuvering this mastodon with utmost delicacy around parked cars, some 100 yards in all: a double black diamond.

He scopes out the route, returns, and revs the truck. Then he guides it glacially backward, threading it past car after car and somehow nicking none—a kind of calligraphy—and nearly makes it when the truck’s antenna catches on a low overhang and snaps clean off. Childs stops, snarls profanities, then resumes and reaches the dock, emptying the tonnage of cornmeal in the night.

I stay with them just half a day longer. We pick up a load of steel piping in the morning and drive north toward Tampa, through Sunkist groves and into a gathering storm. Stop signs jerk spasmodically in the winds; lightning severs the sky. It starts to pour. I watch other trucks wade through pooled water in the road, feeling our own slosh and sway. “Tornado sky,” Childs mutters. My journey is ending as it began.

We drive on in silence, at noon reaching Plant City, near Tampa, and pulling up before the gate of the factory that ordered the piping. No one emerges. Childs calls the foreman, who says the crew won’t come out until it stops raining; they don’t feel like getting wet. “Why can’t the foreman just make them?” I ask, incredulous. “Because he’s a tender-footed sack of shit,” Childs spits.

Hours pass, and no one appears, a waiting that starts to seem existential, starts to stand in for the long-deferred deliverance of a workforce, a way of life. More trucks collect behind us, a convoy stretching to the street, and when I get out to survey them I see that their drivers too are on the phone and pissed, calling the foreman, presumably. But nothing moves—nothing except the winds that start rising, vengeful gusts that pummel and lash like a scourge out of scripture.

I look up at the sky and decide all at once that I need to get out. So I hustle back to the truck and page a ride to the Tampa airport, and when it comes I turn to Childs. “Gotta run, man. Thanks so much for having me.” But he’s taking frantic drags off a cigarette, distance-parenting again—a daughter keeps peeing her pants, the store is out of pull-ups—and in the speakerphone’s background a child is screaming. He hardly notices me; J. D. is asleep. I leave them like that, rushing toward my ride past a line of trucks that sit, in a rain half-diluvian now, aimed at the shut gate and poised, I imagine, to blow it apart.

[cyarsk5230]

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ENTERTAINMENT

IT’S LIT: Celebrating Travis Scott’s 33rd Birthday With All Of His Top 10 Billboard 100 Hits

Written byDavonta Herring

Published onApril 30, 2024

Source: Christopher Polk / Getty

One of the biggest artists and popular culture figures of this generation turned 33 today. Click inside to celebrate his legacy with a gallery of all of his Top 10 hits!

Jacques Bermon Webster II was born in Houston, Texas. Webster lived with his grandmother in South Park, Houston from ages one through six. He then moved to Missouri City to live with his parents. Due to the fact that Webster’s father is a soul musician and his grandfather was a jazz composer, music was already embedded in him. While attending Elkins High School, which he graduated from at 17, he participated in musical theater. During his second year at the University of Texas at San Antonio, Webster dropped out to fully pursue his music career.

One he left college, Scott moved to New York City. He slept on his friend’s floor and spent most of his time at Just Blaze’s studio. Unfortunately for him, progress didn’t come fast enough. He moved to Los Angeles after only living in NYC for four months. After falling on tough times in LA, Scott moved back to Houston but was eventually kicked out of his parent’s home. When he moved back to Los Angeles, he began to sleep on the couch of a friend who studied at University of Southern California. Around the time, Grand Hustle Records rapper and owner T.I. heard one of Scott’s productions. One of T.I.’s representatives invited Scott to a studio for a meeting. During the meeting, T.I. rapped over one of Scott’s productions, laying the groundwork for Scott to sign with Grand Hustle.

After several delays, Scott’s first solo full-length project, Owl Pharoah was released on May 21st, 2013. The following year, he released Days Before Rodeo, his second mixtape and the prelude to his debut studio album Rodeo. The highly-anticipated album was released on September 4th, 2015. It debuted at number three on the US Billboard 200 chart and catapulted him to a household name. Since then, Travis has released three more solo albums (Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight, Astroworld, Utopia) with all three reaching number one of the US Billboard 200, a collaborative album (Huncho Jack, Jack Huncho) with Quavo and a compilation album (Jackboys) with the rappers signed to Scott’s Cactus Jack imprint.

Cactus Jack Records, which was founded in 2017, is just another venture Travis has dived into. He started the annual music festival Astroworld in 2018. Over the years, Scott has collaborated with countless clothing and sneaker brands including Been Trill, Diamond Supply Co., A Bathing Ape, Nike, Helmut Lang and Jordan, just to name a few. The ‘Pick Up The Phone’ artist has teamed up with the likes of Fortnite, McDonald’s and even PlayStation to promote special merchandise, meals and so many other things. He made his theatrical in the 2021 film Gully. Later in the year, he signed a movie production deal with A24.

Travis Scott has left an undeniable mark on this generation. Although he is involved in so many things, the world initially came to love him based on his music prowess. To celebrate his legacy and his birthday, check out our gallery of all of his Top 10 Billboard Hot 100 hits. HAPPY 33RD TRAVIS!

1. Drake ft. Quavo & Travis Scott – Portland

Source:Drake

2. Stargazing

Source:Travis Scott

3. Sicko Mode ft. Drake

Source:Travis Scott

4. Lil Wayne ft. Travis Scott – Let It Fly

Source:Lil Wayne

5. Kodak Black ft. Travis Scott & Offset – ZEZE

Source:Kodak Black

6. Post Malone ft. Ozzy Osbourne & Travis Scott – Take What You Want

Source:Post Malone

7. Highest In The Room

Source:Travis Scott

8. Travis Scott & Kid Cudi – The Scotts

Source:Travis Scott

9. Franchise ft. Young Thug & M.I.A.

Source:Travis Scott

10. Drake ft. Travis Scott – Fair Trade

Source:Drake

11. Drake ft. Travis Scott – Pussy & Millions

Source:Drake

12. Travis Scott, Bad Bunny, The Weeknd – K-POP

Source:Travis Scott

13. Travis Scott ft. Drake – MELTDOWN

Source:Travis Scott

14. Travis Scott ft. Playboi Carti – FE!N

Source:Travis Scott

15. 21 Savage, Travis Scott, Metro Boomin – née-nah

Source:21 Savage

16. Future, Metro Boomin, Travis Scott, Playboi Carti – Type Shit

Source:Future

17. Future, Metro Boomin, Travis Scott – Cinderella

Source:Future

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[anniekoh]

elsewhere on the internet: feminism and the internet

Age of Anesthesia (2023, Hannah Wang @_wannahang)

Heteropessimism, then, falls in line with a broader trend toward what might be dubbed "anesthetic feminism": women engaging abstractly with feminist thought while maintaining a perpetual state of negative anticipation, shielding their hearts and minds from the quotidian indignities of misogyny that their bodies are still forced to experience. While there is nothing inherently new about such a coping mechanism, anesthetic feminism is unmistakably grounded in the present moment because it is explicitly aware of feminist theory and implicitly reactive to the mode of liberal feminism that was most culturally dominant in the previous decade. The liberal feminist of the 2010s called herself "empowered" or a "girlboss," openly aspired to climb corporate ladders, and demanded to be seen as the equal of the men around her. She was always grinding and hustling for a seat at the table, doggedly playing by meritocratic rules to assert her individual worth. Nowadays, her swagger has gone from charming to cringeworthy, her empowerment exposed as a façade propped up by racial and economic privilege. As the girlboss fades from relevance, young women raised on the illusion of liberation through capitalist assimilation must contend with the vacuum left by its shattering. If chasing upward mobility and begging the patriarchal establishment for rights still result in sexual abuse, workplace exploitation, and reproductions of other social hierarchies, then truly, why bother with any of it?

Femcel Heteropessimism (2023, Annabel Tseng @aytseng)

Refusing to engage in gendered fantasies of femininity as clean, pure, and aspirational, femcelcore embraces the opposite by playing up the dirty, the unkempt, and the excessive. Even the over-the-top, hyperfeminine stylization of femcelcore commits fully to the bit of being so feminine and so girly that femininity exceeds the threshold of desirability to men, instead becoming nauseating.

standing on the shoulders of complex female characters (2022, rayne fisher-quann)

i’m not unwell or self-destructive or entirely unbearable — i’m in my fleabag era!  we rationalize our own suffering through the romanticization of those who have suffered before us and, in turn, we provide a blueprint for the hot-girl suffering of those after.  we commodify that rationalization through the era-appropriate medium (for dorothy parker, this was print media, and for me it’s tiktok.  sometimes i am tempted to be bitter about this but then i remember that i am no dorothy parker).  this is a cycle, apparently, that never ends.

west elm caleb and the feminist panopticon (2022, rayne fisher-quann)

within 24 hours of the caleb videos going viral, several million people had collaborated in mass-publicizing his face, full name, job, and list of past partners. thousands of people are working on a coordinated campaign to get him fired, and a series of blue-check brands have started using his name in advertising to try and shill everything from jeans to mayonnaise. i’ve talked about the sickening nature of the phenomenon before, when brands capitalized on couch guy for social media clout — i can think of few things more disgusting than companies profiting off the non-consensual commodification of real people’s lives. but there’s something even more sinister about it this time. the fact that hordes of women gleefully ate up tongue-in-cheek caleb-branded ad campaigns made it clear to me that any justifications of a high-minded feminist morale were purely aesthetic: either you admit that you’re cool with companies making money off of an abuse scandal, or you admit that the anti-caleb campaign was never really about abuse at all. 

the pain gap: on dating, maturity, & the benign psychohorror of womanhood (2021, rayne fisher-quann)

the problem with dating men is that there is often no smoking gun — no terrible crime, no obvious transgression, no moment that you can use to justify the enormity of what you feel to yourself and others. i wasn’t groomed by any of the older men i dated; none of them ever advanced past the point where i said “no”. i chose, willingly and often enthusiastically, to enter those relationships and to stay in them. sometimes, in the small, secret part of myself where i tuck away my worst impulses, i wished they had gone just a little further, wronged me just a little bit more clearly, because maybe then i wouldn’t feel quite so crazy about hurting so much. without laws broken or lines crossed, women’s pain is madness.

[365days365movies]

Action January: Omnibus

As I prepare for the future of this blog (and there is a future, if anybody's wondering), I find myself looking back at the good times, when I had the time to watch a movie a day and write a blog about it, which...yeah, wasn't even sustainable for me in 2021, so make of that what you will. ANYWAY, I decided that I would bring all of these posts together in an omnibus of sorts, so anybody that wanted to read these posts could find them all easily in one place. This, alongside other archives, are going to be pinned to the top of my page, and will serve as a long index of the films in the appropriate genres. The goal? To extend these archives as I go along, and have this running index for my blog. And again...there will be additions...

SO! With that, feel free to check out these films in the action genre, which remains one of my favorites! Any films you'd like to see in this list? Comment, reblog, message me, whatever! I'm always open to suggestions to add to my ever-building master list. And check out the other indices to come!

Introduction to Action (2021)

Top Gun (1986; dir. Tony Scott) (Part I | Part II | Review) Mission Impossible (1996; dir. Brian De Palma) (Part I | Part II | Review) Cliffhanger (1993; dir. Renny Harlin) (Recap | Review) First Blood (1982; dir. Ted Kotcheff) (Part I | Part II | Review) The Running Man (1987; dir. Paul Michael Glaser) (Part I | Part II | Review) Last Action Hero (1993; dir. John McTiernan) (Part I | Part II | Review) The Nice Guys (2016; dir. Shane Black) (Part I | Part II | Review) R.E.D. (2010; dir. Robert Schwentke) (Recap | Review) Kung Fu Hustle (2004; dir. Stephen Chow) (Part I | Part II | Review) Enter the Dragon (1973; dir. Robert Clouse) (Recap | Review)

Come Drink with Me (1966; dir. King Hu) (Recap | Review) Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000; dir. Ang Lee) (Part I | Part II | Review) House of Flying Daggers (2004; dir. Zhang Yimou) (Recap | Review) GoldenEye (1995; dir. Martin Campbell) (Part I | Part II | Review) Casino Royale (2006; dir. Martin Campbell) (Part I | Part II | Review) Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014; dir. Matthew Vaughn) (Recap | Review) Atomic Blonde (2017; dir. David Leitch) (Part I | Part II | Review) The Mask of Zorro (1998; dir. Johnston McCulley) (Recap | Review) Léon: The Professional (1994; dir. Luc Besson) (Part I | Part II | Review) Taken (2006; dir. Luc Besson) (Recap | Review)

The Wages of Fear (1953; dir. Henri-Georges Clouzot) (Recap | Review) Drive (2011; dir. Nicholas Winding Refn) (Recap | Review) The Fast and the Furious (2001; dir. Rob Cohen) (Recap | Review) Speed Racer (2008; dir. The Wachowskis) (Part I | Part II | Review) The Poseidon Adventure (1972; dir. Ronald Neame) (Recap | Review) The Expendables (2010; dir. Sylvester Stallone) (Recap | Review) The Raid: Redemption (2011; dir. Gareth Evans) (Recap | Review) The Fugitive (1993; dir. Andrew Davis) (Part I | Part II | Review)

Mad Max (1979; dir. George Miller) (Recap) Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981; dir. George Miller) (Recap) Mad Mad Beyond the Thunderdome (1985; dir. George Miller and George Ogilvie) (Recap) The Mad Max Franchise (Reviews)

Action January: Summary (2021)

[adamwatchesmovies]

Kung Fu Hustle (2004)

At first, Kung Fu Hustle looks like one kind of comedy: a spoof of period-piece martial arts films. You know the ones. They have these wildly exaggerated villains with demonic martial art skills, heroes with abilities that defy gravity but can only be unlocked once they achieve inner peace - while craving revenge -, a small population of hopeless wretches that need a savior and wild stunts - all of which are taken very seriously. At lampooning this genre, it’s masterful. We get many big laughs. And then, something changes. Suddenly, the movie becomes something else that recontextualizes everything you saw before…

In 1940s Shanghai, the notorious Axe Gang have the police in their pocket and everyone cowering. The only people who escape their attention are those linving in slums too poor to be worthy of their attention. In Pigsty Alley, petty crooks Sing (Stephen Chow) and Bone (Lam Chi-chung) attempt to extort the residents. To their surprise, everyone from the Landlady (Yuen Qiu) to her husband (Yuen Wah) to the tailor (Chiu Chi-ling) to the baker (Dong Zhihua) and the labourer Coolie (Xing Yu) turn out to be master martial artists. Humiliated, the Axe Gang retreats but it’s only a matter of time before they re-appear.

I listed the Landlady and her husband as expert fighters but this might not be the accurate description. This movie abides by its own set of rules, rules that seem to have been inspired by the Looney Tunes. Maybe the Landlord of Pig Sty Alley has super special skills. Maybe it was just funnier to have someone survive a fall from the top floor and shrug off being pummelled by their wife. When characters run, their legs turn into spinny circles with feet on the border. These slapstick laughs are a match made in heaven with kung fu movies. Sometimes, director Stephen Chow goes for the crass and juvenile jokes but most of the time, the writing is clever and subversive. The first scene has Sing attempt to pick an opponent from a crowd to show how tough he is. He keeps choosing someone who could obviously beat him and it's so good.

Kung Fu Hustle leaves you wanting to see more. What I mean is that it contains obvious references to popular film you’ve definitely seen - The Shining, Spider-man, The Matrix Reloaded - and others you haven’t because you’re just getting started with the martial arts genre. You’ll hear a line, you’ll see a detail in the background that makes you go “I bet you that’s a nod to something”. Sometimes, these Easter eggs can come off as the director showing off. Here, it displays a love for movies, an invitation for you to check out other pictures Chow loves so you can come back to "Kung Fu Hustle" and get the joke. You’ll want to, particularly once you see the big revelations this film has in store during the conclusion. You thought Kung Fu Hustle was just a parody but it’s also an homage. It loves the films its referring to and while making fun of them - in a way that’s never cynical - it also is one of those films. There’s so much to like.

If there’s one criticism to mention, it’s the special effects. Several have not aged well and look quite fake. Almost… cartoony. In a more serious film, it would be a big deal. Here? It’s almost part of the joke to have stunts no one could ever do in real life look completely unconvincing. At times, I even wondered if this was deliberate. Probably not but this movie is smart enough that it may have recognized its limitations and found a way to turn them into strengths.

Kung Fu Hustle is consistently hilarious, imaginative, lovingly crafted, thrilling and smart. I didn’t know what to expect going in but it blew me away. (Original Cantonese with English Subtitles, January 1, 2021)

[adreamwithin]

I posted 149 times in 2022

That's 147 more posts than 2021!

8 posts created (5%)

141 posts reblogged (95%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@fsbc-librarian

@musette22

@maddiewritesstucky

@thedamageofherdays

@hanitrash

I tagged 5 of my posts in 2022

#stucky - 5 posts

#bucky barnes - 3 posts

#steve rogers - 2 posts

#marvel - 1 post

#interview - 1 post

#podcast - 1 post

#oh-i-swear-writes - 1 post

#the librarian - 1 post

#fic recs - 1 post

Longest Tag: 17 characters

#oh-i-swear-writes

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

My Pinterest really out here spying on me. 👀

Steve Rogers. ✅ Football. ✅ Balls. ✅

This serves as your official reminder to check out the JockVerse by the unparalleled @maddiewritesstucky

Good hustle 🏈

This is my first ever Tumblr post, folks.

I feel ✨ accomplished✨

#stucky #stevebucky #steverogers #buckybarnes #fanfic #ao3

8 notes - Posted April 22, 2022

#4

There's literally only *one* acceptable response to this question ✅

Link to this neat quiz 👇

#hell yeah 🔥 #once and for all 👩‍⚖️ #iconic stucky moments #facts

13 notes - Posted October 1, 2022

#3

*rubs hands together deviously*

The FSBC wants to thank y'all for this new material. 🙏

We're excited to read these fresh™️ fics from @oh-i-swear-writes @humapuma and @this-wayward-life.

You can find them (and more upcoming 👀) here:

#ao3 #silver-fox-steve-bang #stucky #thank you for my porn #discord be poppin 🍾 #the FSBC reads

13 notes - Posted July 21, 2022

#2

Hey y'all 👋

The FSBC is celebrating our ONE YEAR anniversary this month! 🥳🎈🎉🎊

Back in the beginning, we used to read things in a very structured way but now, as we've grown to know each other, we are more go with the flow. Most often, @fsbc-librarian will toss out links to fics that are suited to our tastes. She knows us all so well that it's like having our own personal fic finder. We love her dearly for this. 🌹💋 We still have a semi-structured format for multi-chaptered, multi installment fics. But sometimes, when we're busy, nothing pleases like a good ol' oneshot. Am I right⁉️ I thought I'd give y'all a glimpse of what we've been reading lately in honor of our anniversary. Heed the tags and enjoy!

Cracks in the Ceiling by @ixalit

(bucky) needs some sugar in his bowl by @controlofwhatido

Not Easily Conquered by dropdeaddreams, WhatAreFears

Wedded Bliss by malfoys_minx

Bucky Barnes: Shower Menace by Dogsled

Day 1: Daddy Kink, Daddy Steve/Baby Bucky by @howdoyousleep3

Sandwich 'verse by @toffeecape

when you move, I'm moved by getouttaherevav

67 notes - Posted October 5, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

The husband sent this gem to me.

Him: this sounds like one of your fics.

Me: 👀👀👀

#O.K., who's writing this?!!? #prompt #stucky

126 notes - Posted November 28, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

[cyanathome]

livetweet masterlist

i have been doing this for so long i cannot afford to give up anymore. twitter sucks so we just moved

i livetweet anything and everything that interests me and im cool with requests 👍

upside down magic (2020)

2020 mtv vmas (8/30/2020)

julie & the phantoms ( )

vampire vs. the bronx ()

2020 bet hip hop awards (2020)

positions- ariana grande (2020)

from paris with love (2010)

kikis delivery service (1989)

good news - megan thee stallion (2020)

BE - BTS (2020)

plastic hearts - miley cyrus (2020)

nightmare vacation - rico nasty (2020)

sawayama [deluxe] - rina sawayama (2020)

disharmony: stand out - p1harmony (2020)

border: day one - enhypen (2020)

love & monsters (2020)

minisode1: BLUE HOUR - tomorrow x together [TXT] (2020)

american hustle (2013)

kakegurui drama (2018)

2020 AMAS

into the cosmos - rakiyah (2020)

we can be heroes (2020)

parasite (2019)

seraph of the end: vampire reign (2015)

goodbye rania - blackswan (2020)

oh the places youll go - iamdoechii (2020)

bratz rock angelz (2005)

kid cosmic [S1] (netflix - 2021)

postions [deluxe] - ariana grande (2021)

sonic the hedgehog (2020)

green blue + indigo violet - COIN (2021)

red orange - COIN (2021)

2021 grammys premiere show

2021 grammys red carpet ceremony

2021 grammys main show

jujutsu kaisen [S1] (2020)

twilight (2009)

the most beautiful moment in life pt. 2 [HYYH 2] - BTS (2015)

the way of the househusband (2021)

disharmony: break out - p1harmony (2021)

death note drama (2015)

border: carnival - enhypen (2021)

greatest hits - waterparks (2021)

my little monster (2018)

planet her - doja cat (2021)

classroom of the elite (2017)

soul eater (2008)

leverage: redemption (2021)

chainsaw man [csm - manga] (2018)

teatro d’lra vol. i - måneskin (2021)

the best from now on - shinee (2018)

kamisama kiss (2012)

code geass: lelouch of the rebellion (2006)

blue letter - wonho (2021)

sk8 the infinity (2021)

kekkai sensen [blood blockade battlefront] (2015)

the hunger games (2012)

the hunger games: catching fire (2013)

sonic colors ultimate (2021)

something for thee hotties - megan thee stallion (2021)

samurai champloo (2005)

akira (1988)

burn the witch (2020)

fire punch (2016)

pretty boy detective club (2021)

jujustu kaisen volume 0 (2021)

the story of light epilogue - shinee (2018)

chainsaw man [csm - manga recolor] (2021)

trigun (1998)

vampire academy (2014)

uncanny valley - COIN (2022)

beam me up - mystery skulls (2022)

spy x family [S1] (2022)

avatar the last airbender [atla] finale (2005)

tiger & bunny (2011)

facade - wonho (2022)

over the top - INFINITE (2011)

hellsing ultimate (2006)

mr. & mrs. smith (2005)

monster high: the movie (2022)

chainsaw man anime (2022)

school for good and evil (2022)

man of steel (2013)

the DUFF (2015)

fullmetal alchemist brotherhood (2009)

trigun stampede (2023)

[leatafandom]

I posted 4,562 times in 2022

That's 1,555 more posts than 2021!

110 posts created (2%)

4,452 posts reblogged (98%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@rich-a-day

@idabbleincrazy

@ldrmas

@datajana

@quicksilver-castiel

I tagged 2,570 of my posts in 2022

Only 44% of my posts had no tags

#sam winchester - 247 posts

#sabriel - 221 posts

#gabriel spn - 127 posts

#❤️❤️ - 121 posts

#spooky season - 92 posts

#🤣🤣 - 88 posts

#richard speight jr - 80 posts

#amazing - 70 posts

#gabriel - 70 posts

#dean winchester - 53 posts

Longest Tag: 123 characters

#i try to be a detective and then realize its 5 in the morning and ive been trollif tumblr for hours so not a good reference

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

Sabriel - jamming out to the radio at midnight? What are they listening to ????? (:

Absolutely dear! Thanks so much for the ask, I’ve honestly been having a bit of writer’s block so it was really fun to write something this weekend! I hope you enjoy it. It took a bit to pick out the songs but I just couldn’t help myself with the first one. I ended up going with two: Heat of the Moment by Asia and Never Wanted to Dance by MSI. I love picturing some stress relief dancing fun for them. Happy reading! I hope you enjoy it and thanks again!❤️

Tags: established relationship, comfort, fluff with a little angst, date night, late night dates, music, night drives, singing and dancing, Sam Winchester needs to have some fun

Summary: Sometimes Sam gets lost in the cases and the hustle of all the new hunters in the world. Sometimes he forgets to breathe and remembers to have fun. 

Dancing in the Dark

"Come on, Samalamb." 

Sam tilted his head away from his laptop screen, combing his hand back through his hair, and looking at Gabriel's outstretched hand and then the archangel attached to it.

"Gabe, I'm busy." 

"No, you're not." The blonde shook his head, his hand staying outstretched between them. "You're getting nowhere." His lips twisted in a grimace at his own bluntness. "Come on, Sammich, up up up. Come and stretch those gorgeous gams with me."

Sam released a wearily chuckle before sighing. He sat back in his chair, his eyes roving over the books and notes scattered for three different hunts around him, wondering what time it was, before landing back on the archangel's mischievous amber eyes. The taller man narrowed his own eyes, scrutinizing the archangel's expression. The archangel impatiently bounced his brows and grabbed Sam's arm when his lover stared just a hair too long and hard at him, the teasing action startling a laugh from Sam's lips. 

"Jeez!" Gabriel groaned, wrapping his hand around Sam's, pulling him from the chair he'd been in all day. "Come on, like I'm trying to lure you to your death." 

"It would not be the first time…" the brunette grumbled under his breath, giving into his partner's grip. 

"Oh ouch Sammoose," Gabriel huffed, feigning hurt. “You know, maybe I just wanna fuck."

"If you wanted to have sex…" Sam's words faded as he rose from his chair with an exaggerated stretch that felt better than it should. "Then we'd already be in our room," he added around a groan when his spine popped. 

Amber eyes couldn’t resist the shift of Sam’s muscles under his clothes. His eyes snapped back to Sam’s smug smile and knowing gaze when the long arms dropped from above Sam's head to swing at his sides. 

"Also very true," the archangel admitted without hesitation, his fingers interlocking with Sam's before leading him from the library and towards the garage. 

"Where are we going?" Sam questioned, self-consciously combing his fingers through his scraggly beard, wondering if he could sum up the energy to shave.

"A drive." Gabriel slipped his hand into his pocket, fishing out a set of keys before tossing them over his shoulder to the bruttnete. 

"A drive?" Sam asked as he fumbled for the keys, juggling them before securing them in his hand with a raised brow. 

"Driving relaxes you," the shorter man replied casually. "So,” his eyes looked about the garage as they entered it, avoiding looking at the hunter behind him, “we're going to drive somewhere." 

Sam felt something give within his chest, squeezing his hand around Gabriel’s, his eyes roving over the blonde. Whiskey eyes were focused elsewhere, ignoring the soft expression the other was surely giving him from behind, focused on guiding the taller male towards the truck that matched the keys. The brunette looked away from Gabriel towards the keys in his hand as they stopped in front of an old pickup, a smile teasing on his skeptical lips. 

"And where exactly are we driving to?" 

"Somewhere," Gabriel sang with a grin, pulling him down for a kiss. 

The blonde pulled back with a wink, turning from the tall hunter to slide into the passenger side of the old pickup truck. Sam rolled his eyes, his lips pulled into a frown that was threatening to crack into a smile. 

“You’re ridiculous,” Sam said around a sigh, opening the driver’s side door and taking his seat. 

The archangel laughed, smiling as he rolled down his window before bending over the brunette’s lap once Sam had closed his door. Sam shifted under the archangel’s reach as the other rolled down his window. 

“We have fun!” Gabriel beamed, leaning back from between Sam and the wheel before scooting closer to Sam’s side as the tense human started the engine with a chuckle. 

The late summer air, which smelled of grass fields and fresh rain, was more relaxing than Sam would ever admit. The more they drove the more the hunter was grateful for the fresh breeze that rolled through the cab. The breeze carried the music that had his fingers tapping along to the radio and his partner’s singing. Throughout the drive, Gabriel sang along with the radio getting Sam to join in and inserted directions at seemingly random moments. 

With the archangel’s choice in stations and dancing beside him, Sam easily let the stream of endless hunts fall from his mind and the worries that waited further and further behind them. The sound of the truck’s rumbling engine and Gabriel's warm wiggling body beside him soothed his worried mind. Sam's tense broad shoulders relaxed and leaned back, his right hand had long found the archangel's somewhere along the drive and squeezed the archangel's hand. The hunter leaned closer to the shorter blonde on the cushions of their seat, singing along with Gabriel’s jovial tone to the pop song as they drove down the dark back roads that surrounded the bunker. 

"Right up there, and you'll see it." Gabriel's hand squeezed his, a smirk tugging on his lips. 

See the full post

22 notes - Posted September 3, 2022

#4

Ooh #63 would make a great Sabriel (cuz we just know Gabe is a noisy lil fuck in bed, right?)

Yes! These words were made for Gabriel! I have no idea why this fic took so long to come to me, but I finally give you smut! Thank you so much for the ask and understanding that the muse works in mysterious smutty ways. 😂 Happy Reading ❤️

Rated: Explicit

Tags: smut, anal sex, bet, kissing, on the sofa, hand jobs, plot what plot, Gabriel is a screamer

The Easiest Bet

"This is a stupid bet." Sam sighed, his arms crossed over his chest, as he looked down at his partner as the archangel lounged on the TV room's couch. Sam shifted his stance in front of him. "You cannot hate my movies that much." 

The archangel rolled his eyes, stretching out more across the two-seater. "I assure you I do hate your documentaries that much, Sammykins," Gabriel reassured with a roll of his wrist. "Somehow they are more boring than actually living it. Come on, Sammoose. First one to make a noise loses and the winner gets to pick what we watch for a month."  

Sam shook his head, a crooked smile weaseling its way onto his lips. He ducked his head, looking down. "There is no way you would win that bet, Gabe. You have to know that right? Do you even realize how loud you always are?" Sam asked with a wave of his hand.

"Hey," Gabriel cried, pointing a finger at him and sitting up a bit on the sofa. "I can be quiet if I want to be! Overconfident moose," Gabriel huffed, his lips pulling into a scowl. 

The brunette bit his lip trying to stifle his laughter. "Gabriel, I have spent my whole life living with someone. Mostly Dean," Sam said, tucking his chin to his chest trying to control his amusement. "And Cas normally has to soundproof our room so Dean doesn't have a stroke." He let out a chuckle looking at his partner just as Gabriel rolled his eyes waving a dismissive hand at him. "There is no way you can stay quiet longer than me." 

"I can be quiet, Winchester." The blonde shifted, sitting up fully on the sofa. "Especially if it means I don't have to watch a single documentary for a month." 

Sam sighed, running a hand through his locks, looking to the bunker hallway as he thought about it. "Make it two months," he said looking back at Gabriel with a wide smile, knowing he couldn't talk his boyfriend out of it and that he would definitely win. "I'll do it if the winner picks for two months." 

"Deal." Gabriel's grin widened, his brows bouncing. 

"First one to make noises loses?" Sam questioned, bending down over the sofa and pressing a kiss to the blonde's grinning lips. 

The archangel leaned into the teasing press of lips, his fingers reaching to stroke through Sam's beard. "Yes, Samheart."

Sam chuckled against his lips, pressing the shorter man back into the cushions and deepening the kiss. Gabriel smiled into it, wrapping his hand around Sam's nape to keep him close, parting his lips. The brunette's tongue slid into his lover's mouth as his hands rolled down Gabriel's sides, lifting him with ease and sliding onto the sofa to take the shorter man's space on the couch. 

Gabriel let out a silent gasp as Sam's long arms wrapped around him and pulled him into his lap, straddling him. Large hands quickly slid Gabriel's jacket off before working his shirt off. The archangel bit his lip, breaking the kiss to help take his shirt and jacket off, his hips grinding down on Sam's half-hard member. Sam licked over his lips at the feeling of Gabriel's round jean-clad ass grinding down on his hardening length. He rocked up to him, his hands going to Gabriel's belt wanting to feel him. 

The shorter man's lips were on him again the moment they were free from their shirts, rocking his hips and lifting them as Sam shoved down his pants and boxers. The blonde sucked and bit at Sam's neck, his eyes flashing with grace as their clothes vanished, biting down on the tender clave of skin at Sam's neck to stop himself from moaning at the feel of Sam's hardening flesh pressed bare against him. 

Sam's hips rutted at the feeling of smooth skin against him, his hands clenching around Gabriel's gyrating hips. His eyes closed at the hard bite and the soothing suckling of his lover's lips that went right to his groin swallowing back a hiss of delight. Hazel eyes rolled behind his lids, his hands clenching at Gabriel's ample cheeks spreading them and biting back a moan at the feeling of his already prepared opening. Gabriel shuddered, pressing his face to Sam's neck as he gripped Sam's long cock squeezing him and stroking him in his hand. The brunette bit harder on his lip, holding in a grunt when Gabriel's hand was on him, cursing internally at his lover's perfectly tight grip. 

The archangel pulled back with a smirk, looking over Sam's heaving chest as he stroked him into fullness. He grinned as Sam rutted into his hand before lifting his hips and hovering over the thick member as it throbbed in his hand. The hunter held tight to his hips watching as Gabriel sank down on him, huffing out a heated breath through his nose as Gabriel took all of his length in with slow torturous rolls of his hips. The blonde withheld a whine at the slow pace, knowing any faster and he'd cry out. He bit his lips as his fingers clenched on Sam's broad shoulders only to gasp a breathless silent moan when Sam rutted up into him, forcing the archangel to take all of him with one smooth roll of his hips. 

The blonde's head rolled forward, shuddering at a breath barely containing his cry when Sam held tighter to the archangel's waist, holding him still and burying himself inside of the wet canal. Gabriel shuddered at the easy stretch and burn of Sam's thick shaft relishing in the sudden fullness, wanting to cry out. He held tighter to Sam, determined to be quiet even when the taller man found his prostate. Sam licked his lips, his cock rubbing against the bundle of nerves with his every upward thrust. 

Gabriel clenched around him, biting down harder on his lips as Sam drilled into him, moving with him. Sam panted, pressing open mouth kisses against the smooth sunkissed skin, his eyes rolling at the clenching walls of his lover. His hips moved in tandem with each roll of Gabriel's, the archangel clenching tighter around him with his efforts to keep quiet in the face of the brunette's punishing pace. Gabriel's head rolled, his nails scraping at Sam's shoulders and back, rocking with each of Sam's thrusts, his cock bouncing and aching between them. 

Sam's head went back, not knowing if he could stay quiet with the delicious warmth wrapped around him. He wasn't going to lose. An idea struck him as he watched the archangel bite back his cries. A smirk pulled on Sam's lips, wrapping an arm tight around Gabriel’s hips and pulling from him with a silent gasp. Gabriel couldn't hold back his whine at the sudden loss or the cry that was forced from his lips when Sam bent him over the arm of the sofa. The taller man lined his thick head against his rim from behind him before shoving back inside of him in one long smooth thrust. 

"Fuck!"

Sam let out a low guttural groan, his smile wide as he thrusted relentlessly into Gabriel. "Dumbest bet," he said around a moan, wrapping his hand around Gabriel's leaking cock.

"Goddamnit, your cock feels so good,"  

Gabriel groaned, admitting defeat and sinking fully into the spikes of bliss that racked through his vessel. "Shit right there, Sammy," he hissed. His hands gripped tight to the arm his chest was pressed against, bucking his hips back to him as Sam rocked into him, his head hanging. "So fucking good." 

The brunette smirked his left hand holding tight to Gabriel's hip, losing his rhythm quickly when the blonde let his moans run free. "Fuck, I love your voice, " Sam grunted out, bending over him more and slamming his hips faster. "Love it when you scream for me." 

Gabriel let out a low groan at the heated words as Sam's hand stroked his cock faster. "Gonna cum… Fuck Sam don't stop." His hips rocked between the thrusting length and the tight fist around his weeping member. 

Sam nodded against him, grunting out his agreement as he thrusted into the fluttering warmth around him, cumming with a choked-off moan against Gabriel's back. The archangel's hips jerked as Sam stiffened behind him, his orgasm hitting him hard as Sam's thumb dragged over his wet tip, cumming over his lover's hand with a shout and a curse. 

See the full post

23 notes - Posted August 21, 2022

#3

"The couple's first morning together was spent in relative ease. Gabriel relaying his plan to take Sam into the sleepy town not far from the cabin before their hike over breakfast. A town which the archangel had introduced with flair as they bundled up in their winter gear as new.

Sam rolled his eyes at Gabriel's dramatics regarding the small town down the mountain as they walked out of the door. He narrowed his eyes, pulling out his phone as he followed Gabriel's confident stride. Sam fell into step beside the archangel as he looked up the small town's founding on the long walk into town from Gabriel's house.

Sam huffed. "Gabriel," Sam rolled his eyes, turning his screen towards the archangel. "1838 is not new."

The archangel's arms swung gently back and forth at his sides. "It's new, Sammy," Gabriel said with a dismissive roll of his eyes, not bothering to look at Sam's phone.

Sam looked back down at the article. "It's not even a town! It's a village," Sam added, looking back at the shrugging archangel.

Gabriel turned to him, squinting at Sam in the morning light and his moose decorated and fur-lined ushanka. "Fine, it's a new village," Gabriel snarked, waving his left hand in the air between them.

"No." Sam shook his head, looking around the wooded path. "No, I don't care if you are as old as time, the 1830s is not new."

Gabriel scoffed, his head snapping to look at Sam. "I am not as old as time!" He huffed, his left hand gently swatting at Sam's bicep.

Sam laughed, raising his hands and bending away from Gabriel's playful wacks. "Fine," Sam relented, pushing his phone and hands into his coat pockets. "Even if you're slightly younger than time-"

"Jeez, make a celestial feel all his eons," Gabriel interjected with a dramatic roll of his wrist and eyes.

"The 1830s is not new, Gabe."

"The 1830s is new," Gabriel repeated, pointing a finger at him. "Time is relative, Sam-I-am."

Sam shook his head, huffing out a dry amused laugh. "Yeah. Uh-huh. Whatever you say, old man," Sam said around his teasing laughter, turning to Gabriel with a crooked grin as they walked. "Take me to this crazy new-fangled town of theirs."

"Wiseguy," Gabriel said, narrowing his eyes with a grin and checking his shoulder against Sam's side."

Preview from Chapter Seven of Seasonal Healing, Clear Night's and Story Horizons, coming to my Ao3 this weekend.

26 notes - Posted January 26, 2022

#2

A Little Pick Me Up

Rated: E

Ship: Sam Winchester/Gabriel

Tags: Human Au, shameless smut, prompt fic, established relationship, lazy mornings, blow jobs, Gabriel's just not a morning person

Author Notes: Created for @idabbleincrazy prompt request for characters waking up together “breakfast in bed?" “define breakfast." Look what the muse remembered and finally unexpectedly finished! I hope you enjoy it. Thank you for sending the ask (hopefully I finish the other one soon as well) <3

A Little Pick Me Up

Sam smiled against his pillow, pulling his lover closer. The muffled grumble he received caused a chuckle to rumble free from his chest and his long arms to wrap more securely around the tempting hips. 

"Morning," Sam mumbled, kissing the top of Gabriel's head. 

"Morning is a subjective term, Sammoose." The shorter man’s eyes hesitated to open. Managing only to crack open one when Sam continued to bury his face in the crook of his neck and searched blindly for his phone. "Ugh, Sammy! It's not even seven in the morning." The older man groaned at the time that blazed from his too-bright screen, slamming it back down and closing his eye. 

Sam let out his own huff of frustration at his partner as Gabriel buried himself back against him, twisting around and burying his face in his chest. The brunette knew that the blonde enjoyed his sleep on the days he had off but the college student still had classes and Gabriel had promised to spend the day with him.

“You said you’d come with me today,” he reminded, stretching beside him before tightening his long arms around the curled-up man. 

“Not before seven in the morning, Samwise.”

The taller man rolled his eyes at the muffled reply, releasing a hum when he felt Gabriel’s lazy mouth drag across his bare skin. "Yes, you did. You said we’d carpool and I have a morning class, Gabe," Sam replied, resisting the urge to close his eyes as the blonde’s lips left lazy-open-mouth kisses over one of his nipples before making their way up his chest and over his collar bone. 

“That’s entrapment, lawyer boy,” Gabriel teased as large hands held tighter to his boxer-clad hips, pressing his morning wood against Sam. “I never would have agreed if I had remembered my day off was Wednesday this week.” 

Sam’s hazel eyes closed, pressing closer to him, at the firm outline of Gabriel’s thick erection, and his distracting lips as they traveled over his neck. “You weren’t that tired when I asked.” He countered feeling Gabriel whine against his skin. 

"Too early, Sammykins." He rebutted weakly, leaning back to look up at Sam, rolling his hips tantalizingly. "Where's my pick me up, Winchester?" He questioned with a wide grin, running his hand up Sam’s flexing arm and squeezing his bicep. 

"Seriously?" Sam’s head tilted back slightly with his laugh, unable to resist the press of Gabriel's clothed length against him. 

"Yes, seriously. You know I don't function this early without a little something, somethin’," Gabriel said with a yawn that may have been fake. 

The brunette sighed, laying his head in the crook of his elbow, letting his eyes wander Gabriel’s body as the blonde stretched. He turned his head, glancing at the time before turning fully back to his lover, letting his eyes rove his barely clothed body.

"Breakfast in bed?" 

Gabriel's eyes glistened with mischief, his eyebrows bouncing. “Define breakfast, Sammy boy."

The taller released a chuckle at his boyfriend’s lecherous smirk. “A liquid one. Where only I eat something.” He hummed as Gabriel wrapped an arm around his neck pulling him closer. 

“Color me intrigued,” Gabriel hummed, capturing Sam’s lips in a kiss before rolling onto his back and pulling the brunette with him. 

Sam released a soft grunt against his lips, pulling back to leave a trail of lazy sucking marks down Gabriel’s chest. The blonde released a pleased hum, his fingers tangling in his partner’s brown hair as Sam worked his way lower. Long fingers coasted over Gabriel’s arching sides before slipping into the rim of his boxers. Sam’s tongue traced slowly over the line of Gabriel’s pubic bone as the older man lifted his hips and pushed down his boxers. Sam pulled back slightly to help free the hardened member, letting his lips graze over the heated flesh. 

Gabriel let out a guttural groan at the first touch of Sam’s soft lips, feeling his tongue dash out to trace the pulsing vein of his aching erection. His hips rolled before Sam’s hand could hold them in place. The brunette stayed beneath their sheets as he dragged his tongue up Gabriel’s shaft, rolling his tongue around his tip before sinking down on him. Slim fingers clenched in brown hair, stopping himself from rutting into the welcoming warmth. His eyes closed as he bit his lip with a curse as Sam sank lower. His toes curled as Sam’s tongue twisted around his base before he pulled his head back.

“Shit,” Gabriel cursed, his hips rolling as Sam’s lips wrapped around his thick base. “I’ll never get used to that mouth, kid.” 

Sam groaned around him, bobbing his head faster on the hardened shaft. Gabriel’s eyes open, pushing back the sheets to watch Sam as he worked his cock. He groaned at the sight of his lips split around his swollen shaft.  

“Wanna fuck your throat, Sam.” 

Gabriel groaned as Sam’s hand shifted, letting go of his hips and letting the man rut up into his mouth with a punched-out moan. Sam held still as his lover’s hands tightened in his hair, his jaw lax against the drag of his lover’s cock against his tongue. The blonde licked over his lips with a breathless moan when he felt Sam’s throat convulse around his tip, his eyes rolling to the gagging younger man. His hips slowed slightly before speeding up once more, trying to go easy on his lover’s throat. Sam held tight to him, his eyes watering as he moaned around the heavy cock. His right hand reached, shoving into his sleep pants and wrapped around himself, squeezing his aching shaft. Gabriel panted, watching Sam’s arms flex to keep himself up and jack himself off. 

“Fuck, Sam,” Gabriel’s head tilted, planting his feet and rolling his hips harder up into Sam’s spread lips. His eyes drank in the sight of his lover working himself and leaking into his fist. “Are you gonna cum just from sucking me off?” Gabriel questioned breathlessly, his eyes fluttering closed when Sam responded by creating more suction around his thrusting shaft. “God, do that again,” he hissed, his hips rutting faster, holding Sam’s head down longer. “That’s it Sammy. Show me how you cum from the taste of me.” 

See the full post

28 notes - Posted August 1, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

''you used me as a pillow." ''sorry.'' or “breakfast in bed?" “define breakfast."

Thank you so much for the ask love! I actually had an idea for both but I'm just not really happy with "breakfast in bed" "define breakfast." Maybe I'll post it at some point, it is a Sabriel, but Spideypool completely consumed the first one. It's been so long since I wrote them. I miss them and even as short and angsty it is, it was really nice to find some inspiration for them again.

Heartbeat

A sudden loud thumping roused Peter from his fitful sleep. He groaned, nuzzling his cheek against the kevlar of Deadpool's suit before his eyes snapped open. His ears filled with the triumphant sound.

"Wade?" His head lifted, pulling his arms from around the bulker man, pushing himself up onto his elbows. "Wade?!"

Wade groaned, a grumble sounding from under Peter as the other pushed himself up from the blood spattered man, both still in their suits.

"Not so loud, baby boy. Head wounds are like the worst hangover." His eyes blinked behind his mask trying to remember what they had been doing and where they most likely were.

His eyes roved around the familiar safe house that was more safe than a house. Wade's hand raised to feel over his masked head before raising it to look down at Peter's unmasked face hovering above him and the concern edge in his brown eyes. His eyes roved over his best friend taking in the press of Peter against him and the other's torn suit.

"Sooo. No judgment, baby boy, but you used me as a pillow?"

Peter's eyes widened, leaning back and distancing himself a bit before looking over his blood covered suit. "Sorry," he mumbled, unsure if he was talking to Wade or his ruined suit.

"You don't gotta be sorry, but clarity would be nice." He shifted more, feeling his bones finish snapping back into place. Wade watched him looking over the causal self-consciousness. "You used my lifeless bloody corpse as a pillow?" Wade's voice hitched watching the other shrug.

"I didn't want to leave you," Peter defended, crossing his arms over his chest and looking over the other's damaged suit.

The brunette hadn't really thought about it. He had already been tired after pulling an all nighter and that was before almost being blown up by a giant space squid and dragging Wade back here. All Peter had wanted was to sleep and hear the steady thumping again after falling asleep to silence.

"Everyone was leaving so… I swung us here. And it's not like you have a lot of pillow options." His brown eyes roved around the warehouse turned living area with a wave of his hand before looking back at Wade. "I thought we could hang out after you… woke up." Peter finished lamely, never used to watching Wade die after Gwen.

"Petey?" Wade's head tilted on the worn mattress beneath him, his hairless brows furrowing under his mask. "I'm okay. I'm always okay."

Peter scoffed in disagreement, shaking his head weakly.

Wade shifted, reaching his gloved hand for his cheek. "You can hear it right?" Wade asked, his hand coming up to pull him back down to rest his ear back over his beating heart.

Peter nodded, slowly leaning back to his broad chest, settling back against him. Wade cradled Peter's head as his other arm wrapped around the younger man's back. Peter held tighter to him with a smile, closing his eyes and heaving a deep inhale at the strong unique sound of Wade Wilson's heartbeat.

"Yeah. I can hear it, Wade"

46 notes - Posted July 10, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

[voluptuarian]

An expansion for my 365(ish) Days watch list featuring 100+ more movies from 100+ years of film, offering increasingly obscure titles and focus on world cinema.

The link above goes to the Letterboxd list, while the text list can be found below the cut. Happy viewing!

The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926)

Un Chiene Andalou (1929)

Bambi (1942)

Ivan the Terrible pt. I and II (1944, 1958)

Alice in Wonderland (1951)

The White Reindeer (1952)

House of Wax (1953)

Carmen Jones (1954)

Night of the Hunter (1955)

Sayonara (1957)

Elevator to the Gallows (1958)

The Innocents (1961)

Carnival of Souls (1962)

The Leopard (1963)

The Great Escape (1963)

The Ipcress File (1965)

Persona (1966)

Le Samouraï (1967)

Witchfinder General (1968)

The Lion in Winter (1968)

La Piscine (1969)

The Color of Pomegranates (1969)

Satyricon (1969)

Midnight Cowboy (1969)

Donkey Skin (1970)

Don't Deliver Us From Evil (1971)

Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1972)

Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)

Immoral Tales (1973)

Penda's Fen (1974)

Murder on the Orient Express (1974)

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

Salo (1975)

Hedgehog in the Fog (1975)

The Mirror (1975)

Marie Poupee (1976)

In the Realm of the Senses (1976)

The Black Stallion (1979)

The Blue Lagoon (1980)

Heavy Metal (1981)

An American Werewolf in London (1981)

Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

Son of the White Mare (1981)

The Nine-Colored Deer (1981)

Evil Dead trilogy (1981- )

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne (1981)

Possession (1981)

The Return of Martin Guerre (1982)

The Living Dead Girl/La Morte Vivante (1982)

Top Gun (1986)

Little Shop of Horrors (1986)

Jean de Florette/Manon of the Spring (1986- )

Maurice (1987)

Hellraiser (1987)

Dirty Dancing (1987)

Jan Švankmajer's Alice (1988)

Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)

Heathers (1988)

Tetsuo: The Iron Man and Tetsuo II: The Body Hammer (1989, 1992)

The Juniper Tree (1990)

Daughters of the Dust (1991)

My Own Private Idaho (1991)

The Lover (1992)

Like Water for Chocolate (1992)

The Scent of Green Papaya (1993)

Sankofa (1993)

The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)

La Reine Margot (1994)

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994)

The Usual Suspects (1995)

Empire Records (1995)

To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995)

Hackers (1995)

The Watermelon Woman (1996)

Event Horizon (1997)

Starship Troopers (1997)

Kirikou and the Sorceress (1998)

The Virgin Suicides (1999)

Chocolat (2000)

Pitch Black (2000)

American Psycho (2000)

Memento (2000)

Ghost World (2001)

Irreversible (2002)

Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001)

Russian Ark (2002)

Hero (2002)

A Tale of Two Sisters (2003)

Kung Fu Hustle (2004)

Blood Tea and Red String (2006)

Curse of the Golden Flower (2006)

Mongol (2007)

Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008)

Thirst (2009)

Never Let Me Go (2010)

Kick-Ass (2010)

American Mary (2012)

Skyfall (2012)

The Lobster (2015)

Kubo and the Two Strings (2016)

Loving Vincent (2017)

Annihilation (2018)

Mandy (2018)

Mad God (2021)

Hatching (2022)

[kamyru]

I posted 292 times in 2022

That's 139 more posts than 2021!

278 posts created (95%)

14 posts reblogged (5%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@lovelovecorner

@kamyru

@times-muse-immemorial

@sterkeyra

@hifftn

I tagged 291 of my posts in 2022

#voltage inc - 253 posts

#oops i said yes - 134 posts

#her love in the force - 99 posts

#irresistible mistakes - 94 posts

#personal - 85 posts

#romance md: always on call - 71 posts

#kuranosuke kiba - 66 posts

#asks - 53 posts

#tokyo love hustle - 52 posts

#shu hasunuma - 44 posts

Longest Tag: 100 characters

#youre from *inserts the country that got robbed in 2014 of 1/7 of all its gdp by its own government*

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

Do you know how in the 3rd season of "Irresistible Mistakes" MC thinks that she is pregnant and things like this?

I really want a rewrite of the whole season for every LI, when MC actually gets pregnant.

Let them struggle. Let them co-parent. Let them talk with their co-workers and tell them that yes, we made a kid out of wedlock, so what?

Imagine Shun having to take the responsibility... Ehhh... Drama.

Do I want to write something like this? Definitely. Will I? Yes, but who knows when... Is anyone interested?

36 notes - Posted May 26, 2022

#4

Look me in the face and tell me that he's not one of the most beautiful Voltage Inc character, I dare you.

This man is gorgeous. Can I just leave my life and start a new one inside "Oops! I Said Yes?!" as Togo's wife?

40 notes - Posted October 6, 2022

#3

Things that "Her Love in the Force" characters said during an argument to hurt MC's feelings

(Do I have to write a version with the entire fight or better leave them just like this?)

Jin Namba

"The gap between us is bigger than just a couple of years."

Hideki Ishigami

"You're one of the reasons I avoided dating someone for so long."

Hyogo Kaga

"I had enough controlling relationships in my life."

At first, MC didn't understand what he was talking about. Though, with every second passed, Kaga saw how it went down on her, how she got that he just compared her to his father.

Shusuke Soma

"And that's what they call unhealthy jealousy."

Takaomi Tsugaru

"Don't act like you're my family when you're obviously not."

Seiji Goto

"Right now, I better spend some time with Subaru than with you."

Ayumu Shinonome

"Poor thing you were brave enough to confess to me, while I wasn't to confess to Sachi."

Toru Kurosawa

"I sometimes think that I was happier with one-nights stand than in a long-term relationship."

41 notes - Posted February 15, 2022

#2

Random Voltage Headcanon #7

Voltage characters that give me the "I'm not afraid of snakes, fire, darkness, bugs, strangers, storms, heights and other normies' things. But phone calls... Phone calls are a different story" vibes: Munechika Takado, Kaede Ekuni, Soryu Oh, Hikaru Aihara, Yuzuru Shiba, Toshiaki Kijima, Natsume Asaoka, Taki Kozaki, Shu Hasunuma, Kaoru Kirishima, Suzumu Mado, Seiji Goto, Taiga Kujo, Daichi Katsuragi, Ryogo Saikusa.

(I'm also afraid of phone calls. Fun fact: I worked part-time at a call center. But it didn't bother me because it was for work.)

50 notes - Posted April 11, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

Random Voltage Headcanon #11

Voltage Inc characters that have shoulders large enough to carry you, your family, your pet, your village, your drools, and both Jack and Rose: Seiichi Setoyanagi, Hayachika Kasatsubaki, Rei Rindoh, Genji Higashiyama, Taro Akuchi, Kuranosuke Kiba, Akiyoshi Zaizen, Jun Araki, Jin Namba, Daichi Katsuragi, Munechika Takado.

53 notes - Posted May 19, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

[angermango]

I posted 1,411 times in 2022

That's 474 more posts than 2021!

36 posts created (3%)

1,375 posts reblogged (97%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@damnwyverngems

@modmad

@twennywan

@slightly-gay-pogohammer

@adobe-outdesign

I tagged 1,411 of my posts in 2022

#pokemon - 533 posts

#subway master emmet - 259 posts

#subway master ingo - 249 posts

#kirby - 238 posts

#monster hunter - 233 posts

#bloodborne - 78 posts

#mk - 72 posts

#gym leader elesa - 60 posts

#music - 58 posts

#joltik - 42 posts

Longest Tag: 136 characters

#‘’hhrrrngh subway trains… this civilisation is is dead… this could be unova after ghetsis pulled his bullshit successfully with kyurem’’

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

they gonna Kung Fu Hustle this b

See the full post

1,345 notes - Posted April 6, 2022

#4

2,090 notes - Posted October 30, 2022

#3

See the full post

2,128 notes - Posted March 12, 2022

#2

See the full post

3,833 notes - Posted February 27, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

See the full post

4,962 notes - Posted March 21, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →