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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 months ago

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“Disenshittify or Die”

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the fuck happened to the old, good internet?

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

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

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

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

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

I’m talking about enshittification.

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

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

There’s so many ways to lock in users.

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

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

No way.

Can you agree on where to go next?

Hell no.

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

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

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

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

Sometimes, it’s a grab bag:

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

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

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

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

Think Different, amirite?

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

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

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

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

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

Bullshit!

Bull.

Shit.

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

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

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

"But wait!" I hear you say!

[Come on, say it!]

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

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

[Any guesses?!]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I mean, you love to see it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enshittification: a tragedy in three acts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Except you can’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So companies aren’t constrained by competition or regulation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Any guesses why?]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To do that, we have to install constraints.

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

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

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

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

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

[Can anyone guess why?]

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

So yeah, that was pretty fucking epic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next up: regulation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess

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

@[email protected] (cropped)

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

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

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

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whoreforgyu · 8 days ago

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pb&j

MDNI 18+

✌︎ pairing; neighbor!kim mingyu x fem!reader

✍︎ genre; smut, neighbors to lovers, au, fluff

ⓘ tldr; after finally mustering up the courage to ask your fine ass neighbor for help opening a jar of raspberry jelly, he makes sure to fill yours up with some cream by the end of the night 😏

⚠︎ warnings; under 21 drinking (20yrs but turning 21 in a few days (& dw even though i am 19 i don’t drink personally, this is just for the fic 😭)), mingyu has a slight thing for older girls, mingyu is a sophomore and reader is a junior in college, mentions of ‘95 liners, awkward reader, mentions of food, lowercase intentional

✎ note; i’m a new writer so this is my first fic let me know how i did 🫣 got the idea to write this after i spent all night trying to open up this jar of coconut oil from trader joe’s lol 😭

⇅wc; 2.4k

after what felt like an eternity of twisting, turning, and damn near college level research on how to open a glass jar, what are the odds that not a single thing has worked.

“run it under some hot water” they said.

“tap the lid with a heavy object to break the seal” they said.

“slap the bottom with the palm of your hand” they said.

but despite the hundreds of google searches and youtube videos you’ve watched, the tin lid to your jar of organic raspberry jelly hasn’t budged an inch.

“ugh!” you screeched, nearly throwing the damn thing at the wall. but you would much rather go to bed hungry than have to clean up fruit preserves mixed with shards of glass from the ground, or even worse, eat a dry peanut butter sandwich without jelly.

now, was there a quick an easy solution that you have thought of, but didn’t dare to act upon? well, yes! but that would require having to interact with your fine ass, johnny bravo-esque, tank of a neighbor— mingyu. at first, that option was off the table, but soon hunger got the best of you.

so here you are, standing in front of apartment 406 in some skimpy boy shorts that expose wayyy to much ass and a sweater, holding the infamous jar of raspberry jelly.

*knock, knock, knock*

the apartment goes silent, you feel nervous as the sound of foot steps walk up to the door, pause, and a zipper opens moments before hearing the lock turn. your cheeks heat up at the sight of him in a tank top with grey sweats. trying to stop yourself from ogling at his biceps, triceps, and quadriceps on full display, and you peep how his matching grey hoodie is coincidentally hanging from the coat rack.

the smell of sweet and savory spices bless your nose, if there’s one thing about mingyu, that man could cook. sometimes he’ll hand deliver you a bowl of whatever food he’s making, under the pretense of, “i made extra,” as opposed to “i was thinking about you, so i made a larger portion just to share with you.” and you swear he’s ruined your whole perception of food, you can’t help but think about how much better everything would taste if mingyu was the one who made it instead.

“oh hey _____, is everything alright?” he asked, looking up and down your figure, taking notice of the jar of jelly in your hand.

“yup!” you say awkwardly, accidentally look down at his man-cleavage “i just wanted to know if you could open this for me please?” an innocent grin plays on your lips as you shove the jar towards him, trying to ignore the way he was staring at them.

he laughs while gripping the jar and lid, twisting them in opposite directions before hearing a-

*pop*

“there ya go,” he says, handing back the jar. you sigh of relief before thanking him and turning to walk back to into your apartment, all while feeling a pair of eyes burning into your ass.

“y’know,” he blurts out. stopping you in your tracks, turning around to listen to him. mingyu couldn’t help but trip over his words at the sight of your doe eyes looking expectantly at him. “i’m making dinner right now, n’ i was just about to bring some over to you,” the tips of his ears now turning red, “but- i mean, since you’re already here, would you mind joining me?”

“yes!- i mean no- like no as in i wouldn’t mind,” shit, you think to yourself, what the fuck am i saying?

“okay perfect” mingyu says trying to hold back his smile (you know that cute 😗 face he makes), letting you into his apartment, allowing himself a closer look at your ass.

to no surprise, his apartment layout was an exact copy of yours, only furnished to his liking, of course. a dark stained wooden coffee table accompanied by a matching tv console, upholding a flatscreen tv and ps5, and a dark blue ribbed suede couch. hm, interesting.

“almost done, just need to finish sautéing these veggies,” he says now facing the stovetop, and you take the opportunity to get a real good look at his back muscles. you’re so glad you got front row seats to see them, since the view through the peephole of your door every time he came back from the gym wasn’t cutting it.

“could you help set up the table?” mingyu turns off the stove and grabs some plates and glasses from the cabinet above, breaking you out of your trance.

“yea, of course” you squeak, hoping he hadn’t noticed the way you were drooling over him just then. you set down the jar of jelly you, for some reason, still had in your hands on to the counter, and grabbed the placemats, utensils, and glasses from the drawers mingyu directed you to. he brings over the dishes and sets them onto the table before going back to grab a bottle of wine.

“you drink?” he asked raising a brow.

“not really, but i don’t mind having a glass,”

“how old are you?” he questioned.

“twenty one, how ‘bout you?” you wary.

“twenty.” he replied. there’s a brief moment of silence between you two before he’s sporting a stupid grin, like he knows he’s doing something he’s not supposed to, waiting to see your reaction.

“so where the hell did you get that from?” you pressed, raising your voice, baffled by his audacity to ask for your credentials when he, himself, isn’t even qualified.

“a frienddd~” his tone playful as he laughs. “relax, i consider this my early birthday gift, i’ll be twenty one on the sixth of this month.”

you think it must be from one of of his older friends, specifically seungcheol or jeonghan, those dudes from your engineering class who come by often, not that you’re keeping count. you sigh, you can’t blame him. you’ve had your own fair share of alcohol during your birthday party that you celebrated the weekend before your twenty first, especially since you could not afford to get lit on the wednesday night before your exam.

“fine,” you gave a tight lipped smile as mingyu pours you both a glass, starting to loosen up as alcohol soon calms your nerves.

“wanna watch that new ‘baby reindeer’ series, i heard it’s crazy as shit!” mingyu laughs, as you two are finishing dinner.

“ yeah i’ve been meaning to start! just haven’t gotten around to it,” you finish up the rest of the bottle, while mingyu takes the dishes to load them up into the dishwasher. you grab the remote turning on the television, and plop down on the couch, briefly pausing to remind yourself that this isn’t your place, but he sure does make you feel like it.

after drying off his hands mingyu plopped himself right beside you, leaving only about an inch or two in between, and smoothly snakes his arm around you, being careful not to make contact though. you laugh to yourself at how respectful he’s trying to be, and wonder if he’s truly oblivious to the not so respectful feelings you have towards him.

half way through the first episode, you can’t help but feel warm, almost hot due to his body heat. his scent isn’t helping either, he smells like fresh clean laundry and natural musk. you want to study his face now that you’re up close, but it’d be too obvious, he’d notice right? wrong, frankly, his ass is not paying attention to you, so you take initiative and scoot closer into his touch, resting your head onto his shoulder, smirking at the sudden tension of his body.

“you alright?” mingyu speaks lowly into your hair, subconsciously helping himself to your scent. turning down the volume on the tv, he tilts his head to hold your gaze, dammit, there she goes again with those eyes, he curses. swiftly glancing at your lips, and back up to your eyes, it’s like he can read your mind. cautiously, lowering his hand to your ass, he helps you onto his lap. “whatchu tryna get into?” mingyu teases.

“i dunno know you tell me, you’re the one who’s got me on their lap” you tease back giggling while biting your lip.

mingyu uses his teeth to now bite your lip between his before kissing you deeply. he couldn’t wait for the day he could he could get his lips on your pretty plump ones. not a day goes by where he doesn’t think about getting the chance to mess with his pretty ass little neighbor.

whimpering at the sensation of his sunken fangs into your lip, you quickly match his energy, grinding your dampening cunt against his growing erection. his hands now gripping your ass like a vice, increasing the relentless speed and friction between you two. hand nearly getting crushed in the process, you reach between your bodies to free his now rock hard cock from his sweats, beginning to stroke him while slowing down to a more sensual pace. he breaks the kiss, letting out a loud whine as you spread the bead of precum, focusing right on the tip, and dip the pad of your thumb right into the dimple before rubbing circles around it.

mingyu’s body shudders as he throws his head back in ecstasy, blabbering a whole bunch of nonsense, while you lick and bite the sensitive skin from his collarbone all the way to his jaw. continuing to stroke his aching cock, “ah! ouu~ shit- baaabe- baby oh! fuuuuck~ m’ boutta-” are the only coherent words he’s able to slew before you cease all movement. his head shoots up, wide eyed as he looks at you as if your head’s missing.

you give him a sweet— almost taunting, smile before reaching under his tank to reveal his sculpted torso, chest rising and falling as you scrape your nails against every nook and cranny of his flesh. you lean forward to give a few licks and and sucks to each of his nipples. mind you, the man is still staring at you in disbelief. giving a sinister laugh, he holds you by your hips and and in one swift movement, shifts his body under you, so instead of sitting on his lap, you’re now sitting on his face.

mingyu wastes no time lapping at the mere outline of your pussy, desperately sucking your arousal through the fabric of your shorts. like a rabid dog he rips through the fabric with his teeth, lips immediately latching onto your clit like a vacuum. you let out a loud cry desperately grabbing fistfuls of his hair as a poor attempt to ground yourself before he’s gripping your waist, gliding your cunt alllll over his face.

“gy-gyuuu~” you whine, your legs starting to shake as you the feel pressure building up in your core. your thighs now locked tight around his head, you’re scared you may suffocate him but you’re far to worried about reaching your own orgasm to stop. “mmmph~ shiiit pleaseee~ oh my- no gyu! piece of shit!” you scream, as mingyu removes himself from under you, a shit eating grin playing on his lips, his face covered in your juices.

you squeal as mingyu rips off any and every remnant of clothing you still had on, and throws you over his shoulder— face down ass up, giving it a quick harsh slap before heading into his bedroom. throwing you down on the bed, he immediately attaches his lips to yours as he slips his thick middle and ring fingers inside of you, curling them just enough to make you cum better than any one of your pathetic toys ever could. if he could give you mind blowing orgasms just with his fingers, just imagine what universe he’d take you to on his cock.

mingyu teases your entrance with his fat tip, gliding it along your wet folds. his cock was looong, thick, and heavy, a vein running along the left side of the shaft. it felt like steel wrapped in velvet. he begins pushing his way into you, nothing could prepare you for the stretch he gave, he felt invasive, greedy, selfish. invading any space he could find inside your small tight cunt.

“just hold on to me baby,” he growls in you ear, his breathing ragged as he bottoms out, pelvis right against your ass. the man desperately trying to help himself from releasing right then and there at the feeling of your wet pudgy walls sucking him in, as if your body was trying to create a mold of his cock to remember forever.

your legs wrap tight around his torso, nails digging into his broad shoulders as he’s rutting into you like a dog in heat. he desperately pants, holding another vice-like grip onto your hips, the combination of your pornographic moans and walls beginning to clench and spasm around him making his cock twitch inside you like a bolt of lightning.

not even science can measure the amount of pent up tension that has built up in your core, the feeling painfully delicious. the sharp thrusts of his cock soon becoming sloppy as you feel him starting to shudder once again, his mouth now on your neck, sucking harshly at the flesh. he brings his hand down to your cunt, beginning to rub messy circles onto your clit making you cry out, sending you over the edge.

the knot in your abdomen comes un done, feeling like an explosion as mingyu shoots what felt like the entirety of earth’s population into your poor pussy. your body goes numb, your vision, seemingly no different than looking out of a kaleidoscope, seeing shapes and colors you didn’t even know existed.

mingyu lays on top of you, cock still sunken deep inside as if he’s trying to fertilize each one of your millions of eggs, his heavy breathing sinking you into the mattress even deeper than you were before. looking up he sees your fucked out state, locking eyes with you before giving you the filthiest smile you’ve ever seen.

you smile back, matching his same filth, before pulling him into another heated make out session. “ready for round two?”

#seventeen #seventeen smut #seventeen x reader #svt #svt x reader #svt imagines #mingyu #kim mingyu #mingyu x reader #kim mingyu smut #mingyu fanfic #mingyu x y/n #seventeen x y/n #seventeen imagines #seventeen au #mingyu au

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markrosewater · 1 month ago

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Maro’s Foundations Teaser

Before previews for Foundations officially begin, I thought it would be fun to do another of my Duelist-style teasers where I give tiny hints of things to come. Note that I’m only giving you partial information.

First up, here are some things you can expect:

• The five iconic creatures each show up on multiple cards

• Two monocolor reprints, each of a different color, that together win you the game.

• Some creature tokens in this set: 1/1 white Rabbit, 2/1 blue Ninja, 3/3 Green Raccoon, 4/4 red Dragon, and a copy that’s a Nightmare

• A character from one of our most popular online Magic stories returns

• An 8/12 creature with ward 4

• A creature with seven evergreen keywords

• A Magic Invitational winner’s card gets reprinted (and no, not the most powerful one)

• Counters in the set: +1/+1, bait, fellowship, incubation, loyalty, revival, soul, stash, and stun

• A card that’s in the top 10 cards I sign gets reprinted

• More deciduous mechanics get used in this set than any previous (non-Time Spiral block) premier set

Next, here are some rules text that will be showing up on cards:

• “This spell costs {1} less to cast for each Cat you control.”

• “You can’t lose the game and your opponents can’t win the game.”

• “target instant or sorcery card in your graveyard gains flashback until end of turn.”

• “Creatures you control get +10/+10”

• “A deck can have any number of cards named”

• “Then exile all other Nightmare tokens you control.”

• “Whenever you draw your second card each turn, create a token that’s a copy of this creature.”

• “Double the number of each kind of counter”

• “You may pay {B} rather than pay this spell’s mana cost if there are thirteen or more creatures on the battlefield.”

• “Draw a card for each different mana value among nonland permanents you control.”

Here are some creature type lines from the set:

• Creature – Rabbit Noble

• Creature – Demon Warlock

• Creature – Shark Pirate

• Creature – Eldrazi

• Creature – Hyena Rogue

• Creature – Spider Spirit

• Creature – Elemental Hydra

• Creature – Bear Demon

• Artifact Creature – Phyrexian Construct

• Legendary Creature – Zombie Warlock

Finally, here are some names in the set:

• Boltwave

• Electroduplicate

• Fishing Pole

• Goblin Negotiation

• Hare Apparent

• Homunculus Horde

• Midnight Snack

• Perforating Artist

• Refute

• Stab

The Foundations debut will be live at MagicCon Vegas on October 25th at 2:30 PM Pacific, right after our “The Foundations of Magic’s Next Era” panel, where you'll get a sneak peek at the 2025 sets. You can follow along on social media or watch the full VOD of the debut panel on our official YouTube channel after it airs.

#Magic The Gathering #MTG #Foundations #Mark Rosewater #WotCStaff

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hauntedbythefanficsofmypast · 3 months ago

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Not so Fake

Masterlist

Tim stationed himself in the third sitting room in the Manor. It was the closest to the kitchen, and furthest from the bedrooms and entrance of the manor. In other words, the perfect hiding spot from his overactive family that have united to try and make Tim rest. The only member that would find him right away would be Alfred, who already left him a cup of tea with a few of his cookies along with one of his laptops.

A note left on top stating that Alfred expected him to actually relax, and spotting the stickers Tim could tell this was his personal laptop. Taking Alfred seriously, Tim booted up YouTube and decided to watch his new favorite, GalacticPhantom, or Danny. He had found the channel a few months ago when one of his search engines caught a mention of Tim Drake and Red Robin being the same person.

The video in question had started off with a very well made video of the camera zooming down from a space view of the Earth to Danny’s home town, through his window and coming to a screeching halt in front of Danny and his friend Wes. The opening was highly impressive to Tim and the twenty-five minute video that followed had Tim wanting to pull his hair out.

Everything Wes said was true, completely true.

Tim was absolutely stunned and terrified because the other teen had managed to fully pull together who Red Robin was without even being in Gotham. The only thing that stopped Tim from calling a meeting about it, was that no one in the comments believed him. Instead Wes was mocked with the tried and true, ‘what do the butts match?’. He ended up watching every video under the playlist, ‘Wes the Detective’ and every single video hit right on the money but absolutely no one believed him.

Well, no one but his friends it seemed. Tim had a couple theories about it and if it wasn’t for the fact that Wes has his identity clock he’d be staking out the town now. So he chose to stick to the theory that Wes was incredibly smart, but cursed in some way.

However today Danny had posted a new video and Tim could barely wait to watch it. The title was called ‘This thing wont leave me alone.’ and the thumbnail showed a screaming Danny holding a broom with a humanism but clearly not human girl spiderman to his ceiling seemingly hissing at him.

Tim grinned as he pressed play and settled back into the couch to watch. As the intro came to an end it found Danny in the closet of his bedroom speaking into the camera as if he was documenting his last moments.

“Hello everyone and welcome back to my channel.” He whispered softly only stopping at a noise outside the door that sounded like nails scratching against something. “What the—” the chittering of a badger interrupted him to cover his curse. “Today I’m hiding in my closet because this demon thing showed up and won’t leave me alone.” Something being knocked over in the background was heard causing Danny to freeze again. “I am taking my stand though, I have my makeshift weapon and-and I’m gonna face it. In the event that I don’t come out of this alive, Tucker you can have my Doomed character, Sam just ask them out already, Val you can sell all my stuff, and Wes I’m sorry I gaslight everyone in school that one time into thinking you weren’t real.”

“That was—you Danny, oh you better hope you don’t survive after this!” Wes snapped from behind the camera, his curse being covered by bird chirps, and a second later Tucker’s head popped up from the bottom right screen.

“You’re focusing on that rather than the fact Danny said that all to the screen like we weren’t even here.” Danny shushed them all dramatically holding his broom in front of him like a weapon.

“It is time. Remember me views, remember me.”

“So—dramatic.” Sam is heard but not shown on camera, soon after Danny is shown bursting out of the closet startling the humanoid creature with white hair and bright neon green eyes.

Tim assumes the creature is one of their little siblings decked out in a creepy cosplay, a really creepy one that Sam definitely had to have a hand in making.

The girl immediately starts screeching and hissing at Danny who starts screaming back before starting to swat at her with the broom. Only for her to drop on all four and start crawling around to dodge him.

“Why won’t you stay still!!” Danny cried out as he panted slightly out of breath. The girl let out an evil cackle starting to crawl toward him and the others fast as he head began to turn to the point that it was upside down. Everything was silent before Danny began screaming hysterically while hitting the girl with the broom before she managed to jump on him and they began to fight. The video cut off right as the girl got a good hit on his nose, only to come back to Danny back in the closet with a bloody nose.

“You okay man?” Wes asked from behind the camera as Danny just stared dazed ahead. Danny turned to him, eyes unfocused as he stared at the camera.

“Do-do I call an exorcist? Do we have exorcists around us? Bro I have a demon in my house, and my parents who are ghost hunters can’t even detect it. What do I do?”

“Danny, I think she might have broken your Lego space shuttle.” Val was heard and seconds later Danny was shown back outside the closet in a screaming match with her while fist fighting and rolling all over the ground.

“THAT LEGO SET COST ME FOUR MONTHS ALLOWANCE!!”

“I’M GOING TO MAKE YOU REGRET BREAKING IT!”

“ALL I DID WAS HIT YOU WITH A BROOM!”

The girl seemed to be responding to him in either gibberish, or a language they created. Which only seemed to anger Danny more.

“ENGLISH! SPEAK ENGLISH!!” The girl paused, stopping herself from landing a solid punch to his cheek before grinning at the confused teen.

“No.” Danny seemed stunned before anger took over again and the fight continued.

“You can_____speaking english! You____daughter of a______!!” The feed cut off before returning to Danny who was sitting on the bed of his wrecked room. The girl in question nowhere to be seen as Val cleaned some blood off Danny's cheek with a grin.

“I don’t know where she went, but I know she is still in my house. Tune in next time I find her because she better have some money to pay me back for my lego set. Thanks for stopping to watch this episode of mine and until next time, don’t let the ghosts get ya.”

“That was pretty interesting.” Dick said as he stole a cookie from Tim’s plate. “Are all his videos like that?” Tim didn’t even blink at his brother's sudden appearance as he moved to type out a comment.

“For the most part, ya. He’s a shit poster, his content is just a tun of stuff that is so outrageous and realistic but clearly not real.”

‘That fight gave off peak sibling energy. It’s giving, I’m gonna fight my sibling to the death because of one slight inconvenience.’

Jason hummed as he picked his book back up, dropping down in front of the couch to reread Pride and Prejudice. “Ya he was definitely fighting his little sister. He held back too much and she wasn’t pulling her punches.”

“Only Drake would spend his time watching pointless videos.” Damien huffed, causing Tim to roll his eyes.

“Awe Dami, you know Tim is on mandatory rest. No work of any kind.” Dick grinned before jumping up, wrapping his arms around Damien and dragging him down onto the couch.

“Richard!! Let me go this instant!!” Damien screamed struggling to get away from his octopus of an older brother.

“No! I need my little brother cuddles and I need them from my Dami! No escape for you now.” Damian kept fighting Dick’s hold for the next twenty-five minutes while Tim put another of Danny’s videos on and rewatched it with Jason and Dick watching as well. The video in question was one where Danny went through a locker with his friends and went back in time to when his school first opened. Jason snorted, commenting on them making everything black and white. Danny meets a seemingly see-through kid named Sidney Poindexter and it ends with the two of them having a dance off.

“Bruce, why the fuck are your kids watching a video of a kid dancing with an Infinite Relams ghost?” Tim paused, staring blankly at his computer screen before turning to look at Bruce and John Constantine. “Wow holy shit, the Infinite Realms rarely interact with us since Luthor let the Anti-Ecto Acts pass. Yet that kid is interacting with one like their friends.”

“You’re saying this shits real?” Jason asked, closing his book looking at the screen more interested.

“Language Master Jason.” Alfred said as he walked in from a tray of tea for everyone.

“Sorry Alfred.” John nodded as he moved closer, eyes trained on Poindexter.

“If it is not real it is still more similar than could be possible. They’ve definitely had interactions with the Realms.”

“Wait, what are the Anti-Ecto Acts?” Tim asked his attention zeroing in on John.

“Well fuck, you don’t know? It affects like all of you, thought for sure you’d know. Shit this is gonna take so long to explain. We’re gonna have to call a JL meeting for this explanation because I’m not doing it twice.”

Of Meetings and Musings

#danny phantom aus #danny phantom #dp x dc crossover #dp x dc au #dp x dc #dp x dc fanfic #batman #tim drake #dc universe #dcxdp

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rmstitanics · 3 months ago

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* GENERAL OBSERVATIONS, PART TWO.

4H URANUS folks have probably made quite a few friends online at some point in their lives, and believe that making friends online is much easier for them than making friends in person.

MERCURY SQUARE URANUS aspects prolly LOVE getting into arguments with random people on social media — they just can’t help themselves 😭 They need to be careful to avoid being “preachy” and forcing their sociopolitical views on others. Work on taking the time to learn about both sides of a polarizing issue before actively participating in debate.

Those with VENUS-SATURN aspects may find it difficult to make connections that have the potential for close friendships; VENUS-CHIRON aspects may find it difficult to keep and maintain friendships.

VIRGO STELLIUMS may have a unique ability to predict what will go viral on social media before it actually goes viral, particularly if their stellium is found in the 5H, 11H, or 10H.

I’ve noticed a lot of CAPRICORN, GEMINI, and SCORPIO placements in the charts of both modern and historic influential politicians.

Most colleges and universities begin their fall semesters during VIRGO SEASON.

It’s interesting that as schools begin their fall semesters and first quarters, the MOON is in the 9H of education and higher learning. In mundane astrology, the moon represents the general public, so it makes sense that the general public would be focused on education right now.

10H SATURN natives tend to have strict parents — especially fathers — that hinder rather than help their most formative childhood experiences. Here, the native must learn how to separate their core identity from that of their parents and step out from their shadow.

6H MERCURY might enjoy watching “Get Ready With Me” videos on TikTok or YouTube, and could’ve considered becoming a content creator themselves at some point in their life.

ASCENDANT-SATURN hard aspects, how’s your fall allergies going? If you have this placement, you could be prone to catching a cold, being immunocompromised, or having severe allergies. (Do NOT use this interpretation as evidence for a medical diagnosis.)

AQUARIUS SATURN may be prone to feeling like an outcast in social settings.

5H MARS radiates HUGE theatre kid energy to me, especially when it’s in a fire sign.

#astro community #astro observations #astro notes #Scorpio #Capricorn #Gemini #mercury in the 6th house #aquarius saturn #* astrology

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redr0sewrites · 10 months ago

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Adam x Reader General Hcs

HAD TO WRITE SOMETHING FOR HIM HES JUST SO. AUGAHGEHEG. i love him. characterizing him is so fun, but so challenging at the same time.

🥀 Cw: adam being adam, sfw + nsfw hcs, smut, breeding kink

🥀minors dni with the nsfw portion

sfw:

Adam is more prone to casual flings and hookups, hes def not huge on relationships and longterm partners

this means that if your with him, you must be pretty special bc hes a huge ass handful

while he is a pretty big douche, adam is definitely loyal imo

deep down, hes still pretty insecure about both lilith and eve, and im a firm believer that he would never cheat on a partner if he was in a serious relationship

adam comes up with very.... interesting nicknames for you that are 10x more vulgar than the ones he uses for everyone else

hes HUGE on nicknames and petnames in general, at the start of a relationship theyre pretty crude and flirty but over time they start to become sweeter

sugartits, doll, sweet cheeks, bitch boy/babe, babycakes, BAE, lemondrop (idk it just fits), mama/mami, honeytits, honestly anything that comes to mind

adam likes to put "my" in front of most of your petnames, its not so much in a possessive way, moreso in a bragging way, he just loves telling the world that your HIS

he also definitely calls you bro, brah, dude, etc he doesn't care that it "doesnt sound romantic" 💀

adam finds the MOST unhinged things hilarious, hes the type to watch those ten hour long youtube videos of a spinning potato chip and laugh every ten seconds

speaking of, he has one of those loud, booming laughs with a slight wheeze to it

"BAAHAHAHAHAH BAE COME HERE LOOK AT THIS HAHA" and its just a low quality video of a water bottle falling over???

100% a shitty pickup line user

and also a shitty flirter in general

his flirting is just

obnoxious

adam is very proud of you, when the two of you officially got together he probably called half of heaven to announce that you two were dating

"THATS MY PARTNER‼️‼️‼️" type of vibes

adam acts like he isnt big on cuddles bit is secretly the clingiest, most touch starved person alive

PLEASE let him hold you, this man is tall af and loves just swallowing you in an embrace

when he was "courting" you (irritating you constantly and flirting with you obnoxiously until you caught on that he was serious) the biggest tell that his feelings were genuine was the amount of physical contact he initiated

adam was always leaning on you, throwing an arm over your shoulder, resting a hand on your thigh, hooking his arm through yours, overall invading your personal space

he was incredibly happy to FINALLY be able to cuddle with you when you both got together, and HAS to fall asleep touching you in some way every night

adam is almost always wearing his exterminator helmet, but he really likes it when you take it off for him at the end of the day. even he doesn't really understand why, but there's something so intimate to him about the fact that you love his real face more than the persona he puts on

he would rather die than admit it tho

hes not good at words or communication in general, and prefers to express his appreciation through actions

he brings you foods that he knows you like on days where you're especially busy, he gives you song recommendations that he'll think you'll like, he'll buy you a trinket he saw you eyeing at the store, just tiny things like that

adam genuinely does care about you, but as per his usual adam-ness, he would rather go bald than live up to that 💀

nsfw:

you cant tell me this man isnt kinky as shit

hes tried pretty much everything

HE LOVES TO HIT FROM THE BACK, DEF LIKES DOGGY STYLE

i also think he would like the mating press too, getting to watch your face as he wrecks you while also having the opportunity to leave bites all over your thighs, and feel them tremble as he fucks you? sign him up!

his dick is big big

i think hed be a little thicker than average, with a few veins running up the underside, but its his length that's downright heavenly

adam keeps himself pretty well groomed, but has a prominent happy trail and light fuzz at the very base of his cock

listen, this is the first man we're talking about, he KNOWS what hes doing

whether you're male or female, he will go down on you

once he buries himself between your thighs youre done for, adam barely comes up for air as he devours you

hes def sloppy w it too, loves when you cum on his face so he can lick it up

enjoys it when you return the favor as well, i actually think hed really realy like receiving head

would def fuck your face until your drooling

if you hve an oral fixation, you're in luck bc he LOVES watching you suck his dick, his fingers, anything really

adam always makes you lick and suck his fingers before fingering you, and will sometimes trigger your gag reflex by shoving them down your throat to watch you gasp and whine

adam has STAMINA, expect to stay up all night bc this man will stop at nothing to make sure you're both satisfied

i swear this man is built to breed, he has a HUGE breeding kink and goes crazy at the sight of his cum dripping from your hole. even if it's physically impossible for you to get pregnant, adam still babbles about "fucking a prety little babe" into you when he cums

adam likes using plugs to make sure his cum stays inside you, he'll also finger it back inside and loves smearing his cum on your thighs and ass

he also brings his fingers up to your face and has you lick the cum off of them

LOOOVEEEESSS marking you, by the end of the night youre always covered in bruises and scratches and hickeys galore

i love adam guys yes ik hes a douche but hes my douche <3

i wish i characterized him better but whateverrrrrr i dont want to write him as a total asshole but hes def not an angel either (haha im so funny💀)

#hazbin hotel adam #adam x reader #adam x you #adam smut #adam fluff #hazbin adam #hazbin hotel adam x reader #hazbin hotel smut #hazbin hotel x reader #hasbin hotel #hazbin hotel x you #hazbin hotel fanfiction #hazbin hotel x y/n #lute #hazbin hotel #hazbin #i love him your honor #i could fix him

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spitdrunken · 3 months ago

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man. still have NOT managed to get my hands on the book of bill because it's sold out literally everywhere over here, but have any of you seen the new 'how not to draw' vid on the disney youtube channel that features bill? it really got me thinking.

notes: fourth wall breaking, obsessive behaviour, unhealthy relationships, implied sexual content, implied mind control

it's heavily implied that the video takes place in a world where gravity falls is supposedly fictional, like our own. bill literally says he's going to break the fourth wall! because i'm a sucker for fourth wall breaks and characters being aware of their own fandom (to an extent), i simply just HAD to run with this scenario.

i just like the idea of 'you' being just a person, some totally, in the large scheme of things, insignificant human walking the earth. you have a tendency for escapism, perhaps. you have always been drawn to stories. you like gravity falls. maybe it was something you watched while you were younger and recently rewatched, or an interest that had never waned. regardless, bill cipher, charismatic and unapologetically evil villain that he is, is one of your favourites.

you doodle him on the edges of paper when you're supposed to be doing anything else. (regardless of anyone's artistic skills, it's not difficult to draw a triangle with a top hat and an eye, is it?) and in this world, you are hardly the only one who likes him, who, perhaps, ships himself with him, who thinks about him a lot. who makes drawings and writes or reads fic. you don't think it's all that unusual.

in a stroke of luck or, depending on how you look at it, the exact opposite, the universe's idea of a cosmic joke, you are the one to catch bill's eye. (it's, after all, much easier to infiltrate the dreams of someone who already has you on their mind. makes sense, doesn't it? a tentative, wavering link had been formed already.) there, in your dreams, he tells you what to say--triangulum, entangulum. meteforis dominus ventium. meteforis venetisarium--and the next morning, you remember it clear as a memory.

you do it. for funsies. why wouldn't you? you don't expect it to actually work. he's a fictional interdimensional demon. why would it work? but much to your surprise, and horror, because surely a screw must've gotten loose for this to be happening, one of your little doodles has life blown to it. as a response to your summon, a tiny little bill cipher darts across your paper, alive but still confined.

(you've given him an in. now, he only has to take the crack you've opened for him, dig his fingers in, and tear it open.)

oh, he'll be funny! he'll be exactly what you thought of him. perhaps he even voices a line of dialogue you swore you wrote down somewhere days prior. yes, he's read whatever you wrote or read, whatever you looked at. he's keeping it himself for now. it's not easy to inflate his ego further, but you might have succeeded. rather than a meatbag, bill first looks upon you with the eye of someone presented with a puppy. fundamentally lesser, but capable of being something with the right training.

he urges you to make a deal with him and the promise he'll act out whatever fantasy you've been cooking up in that brain of yours, even if it's gross and weird and physically impossible!

he'll warp your dimension to make all of it possible!!! it's great!!! don't worry about it!!!!!!

…you don't do it. you don't touch the paper. you've seen the show, and you aren't stupid. bill nearly balks. he'd expected you to be the easiest mark of all time, but he suppose he forgot that even puppies have teeth. that's fine. he can work with this. because even though you have not let him in yet, and you refuse to shake his hand through the paper, you don't seperate yourself from him just yet.

you could oh so easily take the piece of paper he's on and throw it in the nearest shredder. or set him on fire. in you, he recognises lingering curiosity, and the excitement at having stood out, at being chosen, in one way or another. it's not hopeless yet.

he can play a bit of a longer game, then. he's been at this for a long, long time. he'll tolerate the paper he's on being folded into a little square and tucked into your breast pocket, granting him a view of your life and the world you're living in. (all the time, his hunger grows.) your decision not to throw him away ends up being your downfall. spending so much time with bill, letting him joke around with you, complaining about your problems… it takes a while for you to realise that, for a while now, he has not been speaking out loud anymore, but instead through your mind.

a connection that cannot be cut has been formed in between two of you.

on bill's part, he had thorougly expected to be bored. but perhaps it's your genuine interest in him, not the things he's offering, which he does not often see. (he's been down this road before. won't end well. but...) the sheer mundanity of your life that makes him wish he could twist and turn it all around. or just a random alignment of the stars. the heart doesn't always follow logic. in this scenario, at some point, bill realises that he has become genuinely invested in you, too. and at that point, you'll never manage to slip away. he's already dug in his heels in your mind far enough. you had no adequate protection.

he still wants to take over your world. he still wants to escape the discomforting flatness of the paper you've summoned him in. but, perhaps, you two could share that meatsack of a body of yours, before things get that far.

#gravity falls x reader #bill cipher x reader #gf x reader #yandere x reader #yandere bill cipher x reader #yandere gravity falls #yandere gravity falls x reader #x reader #cw.mindcontrol

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jaythes1mp · 4 months ago

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Your secrets are ours, kid

Yandere BatFam x Reader — CH10 -> CH9 -> CH8 -> CH7 -> CH6 -> CH5 -> CH4 -> CH3 -> CH2 -> CH1

5528 words, 31958 characters, 321 sentences, 115 paragraphs, 22.1 pages.

Dick silently observed your sleeping form through meticulously concealed cameras around the room, a secret the family have kept even from Jason's knowledge.

He couldn't help but smile softly at the sight of you, cozily wrapped up in the soft woolen blankets he had masterfully orchestrated to be displayed on pop up ads all over your computer. Using Tim's hacking skills to flood your screen with countless ads for the snug blankets. He had spent months immersed in countless YouTube tutorials and enduring more pricks of his fingers from the knitting kits than he cared to admit. All in an effort to perfect the soft wool necessary to create the cozy blankets he observed you always instinctively seeking out when shopping, seeking to replicate that soothing comfort the same way your favourite sweaters did.

Dick waited quietly for over twenty minutes behind the front door, his phone held in his hand, with a soft grin playing on his lips. He knew the subtle creak of the wood would rouse you from your sleep, and he prepared himself to be the first thing you saw upon waking up.

Grayson couldn't help but coo softly as he observed you, looking around in confusion. You were so adorably clueless without your siblings to guide you, like a lost little bird.

He softly taps his knuckles against the door, but flinches backward as the wood creaks loudly, creating a resounding echo. He quickly checks his phone to see you flinching, and hisses under his breath, "Damn it."

He quickly flicks the app and pockets his phone, fiddling with his clothes to look perfect for your little outing.

After another five minutes of patient waiting, Dick drops his smile and knocks again, this time in a more rushed manner. He can't help but feel just a tad bit impatient, his fingers itching to see you.

He hears a soft thump and a low hiss followed by a curse, and Dick has to stifle a soft, amused chuckle. You must have toppled off of the couch, quite ungracefully, if the muffled cursing is any indication.

He glances down at his watch, noting the time - 01:24 PM. He muses mentally that there's still a good hour remaining before the reservation, plenty of time to coax you out of your cosy apartment and into some suitable clothes.

Dick hums a soft tune to himself as he waits, his fingers unconsciously fidgeting with the anxiety ring Tim had gifted him for Christmas. The fond smile on his lips widens as his deep ocean eyes crinkle with the gesture.

He straightens up, smoothing his hand delicately down his shirt as his gaze zeroes in on the door handle, listening intently to the distinct click as the lock disengages. A soft, sincere smile graces Dick's face as the door swings open to reveal you, disheveled and bleary-eyed. He can't help but find your drowsy appearance endearing.

Grayson’s voice comes out gruff and deeper than intended as he utters a soft, "Hey..." in greeting, the sound catching in his throat for the briefest of moments. He quickly gathers his composure, clearing his throat as he takes in your sleep-rumpled appearance. You looked even better in person.

The fond smile on your face was causing his heart to race. His baby bird. So grown up...

“What are you doing here so early, Grayson?” Hearing you speak jars Dick out of his thoughts, and he quickly runs his fingers through his hair, attempting to smooth it back into place. He can't help but imagine you calling him "big bro," the thought causing his heart to skip a beat, and he mentally berates himself for it.

"I wanted to see how my favourite little bird is doing," he responds with a crooked smile, trying to play it cool. Or rather, that’s how he wanted to reply. Unfortunately, his attempt to play it cool is thwarted. He aims to reply with a casual nonchalance, but instead, his words come out as a spluttering mess. "It's already past one," he manages to utter, his voice cracking halfway through the words. Dick inwardly cringes at the voice crack, mentally cursing himself for faltering so visibly. “It's not that early.”

"I came to see how you're doing," Dick swiftly recovers, leaning casually against the doorframe as he explains his unexpected arrival. "Jason gave me the address," he quickly responds, noticing the confusion etched across your face. He mentally chides himself for appearing so flustered, knowing he needs to come up with a plausible explanation for his sudden visit.

It isn't until your brows furrow and the question leaves your lips that he realises he may have inadvertently revealed his connection to Jason. His mind races for an excuse, realising he needs to tread carefully to avoid raising further suspicion. He hates having to lie to his baby birdy. You deserve to know the truth. But he also knows that Bruce is keeping the information from you for a reason.

Dick can feel his body tensing up, and he forces a soft chuckle past his lips, trying to act casual and nonchalant. His mind is racing, searching for a suitable response to diffuse the situation before you can continue questioning him. “You could... definitely say that.”

Before you can react, the older man swiftly brushes past you, stepping into the apartment and moving deeper into the living area. His sudden movement leaves you momentarily speechless. He almost chuckles at the surprise flashed all over your face.

As you part your lips to speak he quickly steps in, his gaze darting all over your face, committing every little pore and feature to memory. “We’ve got our reservation in an hour.” The man can't contain his excitement as he moves further into your flat, his gaze darting around the room with a poorly disguised smile. He's inside your home, in civilian clothes, while you're awake. This is a moment he's envisioned countless times, and he can't help the sense of giddiness that washes over him.

Your mind races as you follow Dick further into the apartment. A reservation? You weren't expecting any plans today, least of all with Dick. Questions dance on the tip of your tongue, waiting to be asked, but the time constraint and the sense of urgency in his words makes it impossible to voice them.

"Dick, what –” he promptly interrupts you with a firm glance, but instantly softens when he sees the pout on your face. His expression quickly changing to a sheepish one.

"No time for questions," he grins, casting a fond glance in your direction before reluctantly shifting his attention to the surrounding apartment in search of something suitable for you to wear.

As Dick begins walking around the living area, he swiftly and efficiently sets about collecting a variety of clothing items. He snatches up a hoodie, a pair of shoes, and a jacket before adding them to the growing pile beside him. He carefully lays out the garments as he proceeds to plan your entire outfit for the day, as if he's already made up his mind about how you should look.

He maneuvers around the apartment carefully, avoiding any of Jason's clothes like second nature. He's all too familiar with the other boy's habit of leaving his belongings scattered around recklessly. He has no intention of stepping into the minefield that is Jason's mess. Rolling his eyes affectionately at the sight before him, Dick couldn’t help but find the scene slightly endearing.

His mind flicks through the various pieces of clothing he knows are in your closet, but he quickly shakes his head in dismissal. This will have to do for now. He scoops up the collection of clothes, folding them neatly and slinging the stack of clothing over your shoulder cheekily.

He takes a brief pause, his deep ocean eyes locking onto your own for a moment. Searching for something that he seems to find in your expression. A subtle smile tugs at the corners of his mouth before he turns away to begin searching the room for a bag.

You catch the clothes before they can fall to the floor, raising a quiet eyebrow as you look at Dick. "Are you asking me to change now?" you ask, your voice tinged with mild amusement. God, he loved your voice. He's mesmerized by the sweetness in your tone, the way your words seem to dance effortlessly off your tongue. He could listen to you talk all day, every day. It was like music to his ears. The sweet, hypnotising tone that seemed to always reel him in. His baby bird.

His gaze shifts to the area where he recalls seeing a bag on the surveillance footage from last week, when you had used it to buy some pet food. His eyes roam over the floor, searching intently for the bag he had spotted before. “Not particularly asking," A grin tugs at his lips as he spots the small backpack shoved underneath a chair in the corner. Triumphant, he moves over and picks it up, the familiar canvas material gripped in his hand. "It's more of a gentle suggestion."

He turns back to you, holding up the backpack with a victorious expression on his face. "Found the bag," he declares, throwing it towards you. Without missing a beat, he resumes his search, scannings the room diligently with meticulous attention to detail. His gaze doesn't miss a single spot, methodically checking every corner as if it were second nature to him.

"Why do we need a bag?" Your voice cuts through the room, causing Dick to shift his attention back towards you. He silently scolds himself, suppressing the overwhelming desire to croon at the innocent confusion in your tone. In his eyes, you're like a little lost bird, fluttering around cluelessly, desperately in need of guidance from your big brother.

He takes a moment to steady himself, his shoulders visibly relaxing slightly. He moves closer to you, bridging the small distance that separates you. Resting his weight on the back of a chair, his gaze locks onto yours. His voice is soft and tender, a gentle attempt to soothe your curiosity. "We just do," he reiterates gently, as if hoping to ease your confusion.

He leans in further, his voice taking on a more soothing tone. "Don't worry about it," he says slowly, his words meant to assure any anxiety.

His response leaves you frustrated, the vagueness doing little to satisfy your curiosity. Huffing in annoyance, you turn on your heel and stride down the corridor with purposeful steps. You march into your bedroom, closing the door behind you with an audible click, effectively shutting him out. Dick remains in the room, watching your hasty exit with a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. In his eyes, your childish huffiness was nothing short of adorable.

He steps forward and leans his weight against the side of the couch, a tender smile playing on his lips. He listens intently to the soft rustling sounds coming from behind the closed door, where you are presumably changing. Though he can't see you, he is intimately aware of your every movement, each shuffle of fabric echoing in the room like a secret. The closed door serves as a deceptive veil of privacy, one that holds little power in his eyes.

He continues to listen, his sharp senses picking up every subtle sound from behind the door. The soft thud of your footsteps, the quiet sigh as you pull on a shirt, the gentle whisper of fabric against skin. He can almost picture the way your body would move, and a part of him wishes he could see each motion, commit it to memory.

The desire that wells within him is not one of a sexual nature. Instead, it is a yearning for a deeper, more intimate connection. For the kind of trust that comes from being laid completely bare, defenseless. He longs for a moment when you are vulnerable before him, stripped of all defenses and pretences. Where you place unwavering trust in him, giving him the chance to truly cherish and protect you, to cherish the trust you place in him as you reveal your true self. It’s what he yearns for.

Dick's gaze flickers up at the sound of the door handle turning, his eyes immediately fixating on your form as you step out of the bedroom. The sight of you wearing the clothes he had carefully chosen fills him with satisfaction. Each piece fits you just like he had envisioned, and he can't help but admire the way the fabric drapes over your frame.

He casually pushes himself away from the couch, his gaze trailing over your figure with open appreciation. His smile widens as he moves closer, closing the distance between you until he stands within an arm’s length away.

He reaches out, his fingers gently brushing the fabric of your shirt, as if he can't help himself. "Looks good," he murmurs, a hint of pride and possessiveness in his voice. The words spoken lower than a whisper, as if he’s talking to himself.

“See, didn’t I pick the best outfit?" he teases, his voice gentle and affectionate. He reaches out to tug lightly on the sleeve of your hoodie, a soft smile playing on his lips. The fabric is smooth and soft under his touch, and he takes a moment to simply savor the feeling of it against his fingers.

He tilts his head in a subtle move, his gaze tracing over every contour of your face. His eyes rove over your features, meticulously cataloguing them in his memory. It’s an unconscious act, a silent check to confirm that you're alright, that you're there and safe. Just within his reach.

Dick looks up, instantly recognising the irritation in your stance. It's a sight all too familiar, one reminiscent of a certain Damian. Your arms crossed defiantly, like a petulant child. He can't help but let a sheepish smile tug at the corner of his mouth. "What's that look for?" he teases, attempting to dissipate the tension. He can almost hear Tim's voice in the back of his mind, commenting on how much you resemble the youngest Wayne.

Your eyes narrow slightly, the irritation etched deep in your expression. Frustration is evident as you shift uneasily on your feet in the silence that follows. The atmosphere feels charged, weighed down by the unspoken.

Finally, you cut through the tension. Your tone is firm, demanding as you address him directly. "Dick, seriously," you say abruptly, cutting off any attempt at banter. "Why am I changing? Where are we going? You're being ridiculously vague."

Dick lets out a resigned sigh, his smile faltering slightly under the weight of your direct question. He had been hoping to delay this conversation until later, but he's aware that your persistence won’t allow for any evasion.

He runs a hand through his hair, messing up the neatly styled locks. His expression turns serious as he locks his gaze with yours. While the constant questioning can occasionally be irksome, he can’t help but find a certain charm in it, that endearing childlike curiosity that often drives you.

The answer is simple, stated as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “We’re going out.” It’s a straightforward statement, short and lacking in any further details or context. He preens at the way your face contorts in confusion. You looked cute.

You're about to question him, craving more details about the plan, but before you can utter a word, Dick interrupts. He holds up his hand, preemptively stopping any further inquiry. "And before you ask," he starts, his voice steady, "I can't tell you where." His gaze gleams with amusement.

His voice is steady and unwavering, carrying a firmness that leaves no room for debate. But deep in his eyes, a flicker of conflicting emotions dances - a mixture of concern and determination. Dick understands that he can't divulge everything just yet. He knows the truth has to remain hidden, cloaked in secrecy. However, as he gazes at you at this very moment, his heart clenches. It's difficult to keep the truth from you, to prevent himself from simply sweeping you away right in that instant. His contemplation abruptly comes to a halt as you take a step closer to him, closing the distance between you.

You let out a soft sigh, moving closer to him. Your arms are held out, your annoyance evident in the slight pout on your face. The action sparks a tightening sensation in Dick's chest, his heart reacting instinctively to the sight of you waiting with your arms open, an unspoken plea for affection.

Your pout brings about an immediate transformation in Dick. His manner softens, a fond chuckle escaping his lips as he recognises the familiar indication of frustration. In response, he pushes himself off the couch and moves closer, promptly wrapping his arms around your waist, pulling you against him.

His embrace is firm and secure, an unspoken message of reassurance. His chest brushes against yours with each breath, a comforting presence. He pulls you against him, your body fitting perfectly in the space between his arms. Dick buries his face in the crook of your neck, inhaling your familiar scent.

He tightens his arms around you, drawing you closer to his chest. In another context, he would likely take the opportunity to tease you about your pout, a behaviour he always finds endearing. But in this moment, there's a sense of urgency that hangs heavy on his shoulders. A silent understanding flickers in his eyes, and he pulls you even closer, his breath warm against your skin.

He senses the tension that courses through your form, the frustration and confusion palpable in your stance. In response, he begins to gently run his hands up and down your back, trying to ease the anxiety that clings to your body. His fingers press softly into your skin, a familiar touch that he hopes brings a sense of comfort. At the thought of you being upset, he feels a wave of protective anger wash over him. After all, no one should hurt his little sibling. Ever.

Dick rests his chin on the top of your head, his eyes closing for a moment. He can feel the rise and fall of your chest against his, the rhythm of your breathing, the steady beat of your heart. He memorizes each sensation, committing them to memory.

He takes a deep breath, the scent of your shampoo filling his nose. He inhales deeply, the familiar fragrance calming his nerves. He can hear your own steadying breaths, the soft exhale against his chest.

Holding you close in his embrace, he murmurs into the softness of your hair, his words carrying the weight of sincere reassurance. "Trust me, okay?" he says, his voice resolute. There's no room for argument, only a plea for your unwavering trust.

He feels your response in an instant, your arms encircling him tightly and pulling him closer to you, their grip firm yet tender. As you look up at him, a small, tentative smile begins to form on your lips, the earlier irritation dissolving under the soothing presence of his proximity.

The furrow between your eyebrows softens, replaced by the hint of a smile. The stiffness in your frame begins to subside, the aggravation gradually fading away as he continues to hold you, his touch working its magic. You're blissfully unaware of the effect you have on him, each little expression making his heart swell.

A wave of warm affection washes over him as he gently pushes a strand of hair out of your face. His hand then moves to cup your cheek, his thumb tracing the contour of your skin affectionately. His words, soft and soothing, break the silence. "Ready to go?" The image of you, nestled in his arms, is so vividly etched into his mind that he never wants to forget it. In that moment, you were his. His baby bird.

You roll your eyes, the gesture lighthearted and amusing. You lean your head into his touch, your features relaxing into a softer expression.

"I guess," you say, adding a touch of sarcasm. Despite the ambiguity and the unanswered questions, there's a sense of reassurance in being with him. The bond between you is deep-rooted. In that moment he knows that you trust him completely.

A wide grin spreads across Dick's face as you pull away, his arms dropping to his sides. The mixture of curiosity and subtle irritation in your eyes amuses him. He meets your gaze, his own eyes sparkling with a hint of his characteristic playfulness. "You'll find out soon enough; no need to worry." Even though the words are casual, the undertone of his voice indicates a barely concealed desperate urge to pull you back into his embrace.

He turns away, picking his jacket up from the back of a chair. He slings it over his shoulder, gesturing towards the door. “C'mon, we've got a reservation to catch.”

Dick leads you down a quieter street, away from the hustle and bustle of the main road. The ambiance of the area is distinctly more upscale, the shops and restaurants here a noticeable step above the rest of the city. A place he’s spent countless hours researching. It’s perfect for you, it’s got the food you like, it’s one of the lowest crime rates in the city, and the family has full control of the surrounding areas.

He guides you towards the charming little bistro, the soft light of the outdoor lanterns creating chiaroscuro patterns on his features. Dick can't help himself; his hand moves instinctively to tousle your untamed, bedraggled hair, a fond gesture of affection.

A satisfied smirk lights up Dick's face, his confidence evident. "Told you I've got this under control," he gestures toward the entrance. "Let's go."

Dick opens the door, gesturing for you to enter before him. The restaurant's interior exudes refinement, but he barely spares it a glance, his focus entirely on you as he allows himself to admire you.

Immediately, a sharply dressed host approaches, her spine ramrod straight and chin held high. Dick's voice is assured and unruffled. "Reservation for Grayson," he states, his manner self-assured and laid-back. The host already is aware, of course, but Dick is well aware he needs to keep you from posing any unnecessary queries.

The waitress gives a knowing nod, sharing a silent understanding with Dick. She affixes her most polite smile and phrases her question with a courteous tone, "The four-in-one show, is it?"

"That’s the one," he responds casually. The waitress nods in agreement and leads the way to the reserved area. Dick naturally gravitates toward you, his hand finding its way back to your waist, the touch both possessive and reassuring as he tenderly guides you.

The reserved area is tucked away in a remote corner of the restaurant, deliberately secluded from the main dining area. It's a cozy, intimate space adorned with soft lighting, a small circular table topped with sparkling glassware, and padded, inviting armchairs.

Dick courteously draws out your chair for you, waiting patiently until you are comfortably seated before taking his seat opposite you.

He hums, watching over you for a moment before the silence is broken. "What the hell was the waitress talking about?" you ask, leaning your cheek against your palm.

Dick gives a soft chuckle as he settles into his seat across from you, a sly smile tugging at his lips. "You’ll see," he answers in a purposely vague manner, his eyes nonchalantly roaming over the leather-bound menu. However, his attention is not fully focused on the menu. His gaze drifts towards you as he steals furtive glances, observing every move you make with a hawk-like intensity that only an older brother has.

Dick observes your struggle for a few moments, watching as you squint at the small, intricate script scrawled across the menu. He can’t help but chuckle softly, the endearing sight amusing him.

"Struggling there, birdie?" he teases with a smirk. The name slipping past his lips absently.

"How can anyone read this?" He watches you toss the menu down, slouching back in your chair in frustration. Dick grins warmly at your disgruntled expression and reassures you, a touch of humor in his voice. "You get used to it," he informs you, the hint of amusement in his tone evident. "Reading these fancy menus is all part of the experience, y’know."

He leans back in his chair, folding his hands on the tabletop. He takes a moment to observe you as you continue to mutter and fuss, clearly not appreciating the fanciful script and intricate typography on the menu. Inwardly, he wanted nothing more than to gush over how adorable you looked with that disgruntled expression plastered across your face.

"Whoever made these is a sadist," Dick chuckles deeply, the sound echoing in the small, intimate space, making the air feel even more private. "You're right," he confirms, his tone laced with a hint of amusement. "But don't worry," he assures you, a grin forming on his lips. "I'll step in to help you read the rest, if needed."

Your eyes narrow as you respond defensively. "I'm not a child. I don’t need help to read." the eldest brother clenches his teeth firmly, struggling to hold back a heated retort. he bites his tongue. But you are.

Dick expertly buries his inner thoughts beneath a veneer of false joviality, holding up his hands in an exaggerated gesture of surrender. His forced smirk attempts to mask his true feelings, as he replies in that charming manner of his. "Hey, I never said you did," he says smoothly, his tone still even and lighthearted.

"I was just offering my services as a personal menu translator," he teases, smirk deepening as you roll your eyes playfully, clearly enjoying your little bit of banter.

"You're cute when you're stubborn," he comments, the compliment slipping out almost effortlessly, like it's something he says every day. And when it comes to you, it really is.

Dick leans back in his chair, lifting the glass of water to his lips and taking a measured sip. A momentary silence descends upon the conversation as both of you stare down at the menu, each of you lost in your own thoughts. After a brief pause, he speaks up once again, the quiet finally broken.

Dick couldn't help but laugh again in response to your indignant hiss. Your defiant, pouty expression was just too adorable to resist, an almost complete 180 from your usual demeanor. "So," he asks casually, "finding anything interesting on there? Or is it all just gibberish to you?" You shoot a glare in his direction, muttering a frustrated "Oh, shut up."

"Hey," Dick returns with a teasing smile, his eyes sparkling with amusement. "It’s not my fault you can’t read fancy, tiny writing." Leaning forward, he rests his forearms on the tabletop as he continues, his tone more earnest now. "Seriously, though, have you found anything you'd like? I can order for us if you'd like," the peace offering clear in his voice.

A small smile graces your lips as you finally set the menu aside. Leaning back into the chair, you place your arms over your chest and turn to Dick, addressing him with a faux-dramatic flair. "Alright, Mr. Fancy Menu Translator," you declare. "Surprise me." Dick grins widely, thoroughly pleased at your response. He lifts an eyebrow, savoring the moment before speaking again. "Challenge accepted," he replies, his tone filled with playful confidence.

"Surprise it is then." Dick chuckles softly, his gaze flickering over the menu, though it is clear that his attention is entirely on you, rather than the list of dishes. With a smooth precision, he signals for a nearby waiter and places your orders with expert ease. Once the waiter steps away, his gaze turns back to you, a proud smirk plastered on his face.

"Alright, you're in my hands now," Dick's smirk deepens, your name rolling effortlessly off his tongue. You roll your eyes dramatically in response to his conceited attitude, though inside you can't deny the quiet thrill it sparks in you. He always knew how to keep things exciting and engaging. "In your hands, huh?" you muse, arching an eyebrow in a faux-skeptical manner. "Should I be worried?"

The warm, cerulean depths of Dick’s eyes follow your movements closely, noticing the unconscious way you shift towards him, as if seeking out his presence. A wave of protectiveness washes over him, yearning to envelop you in his embrace and keep you safe forever. But he quells the urge, choosing to bask in the moment, relishing the time he has to spend with you. "Oh, I think you should be very worried.”

Grayson leans forward, matching your position and bringing himself closer to you across the table. In a soft, almost imperceptible gesture, he subtly brushes his knee against yours beneath the tabletop, the touch gentle and affectionate.

"But don’t worry," he adds, his tone shifting into something slightly more genuine. "I’ll take good care of you."

You grimace and let out a mock gag, dramatically clutching your stomach as a playful response. Your voice drips with sarcasm as you shoot back, “What, did you steal that from a soap opera?”

Dick feigns offence, a hand dramatically flying to his chest as he gasps dramatically. "Me? Steal from a soap opera? I’m wounded," he grins, his tone equally as sarcastic as yours. Nose scrunching up in extra flair. He revels in this moment, you were acting like true siblings would. He wonders if you somehow know, if you’re somehow aware, but he squishes down the thought.

"You’re supposed to swoon, by the way. That’s usually the natural response to such declarations.”

"Sorry to disappoint," you reply dryly. "I’ll be sure to swoon next time. Maybe I’ll even swoon so hard I fall out of my seat." Dick chuckles heartily at your retort, the sound deep and genuine.

"Careful there," he teases. "I’d hate for you to give yourself a concussion. I’m still enjoying my night." He reaches out to gently pinch your cheek before pulling his hand away, his smile still firmly in place.

You scoff at the action, leaning back in your chair and rubbing your cheek. A soft glare thrown his way. "Stop it," you warn, though your tone lacks any real seriousness. "You’re such a child sometimes."

Dick grins unrepentantly, clearly unworried about your 'warning.'

"You love it," he says, his tone cocky as ever. He has the smug expression of someone who knows exactly how true his statement is.

"I do not," he holds back a giggle at your huff. You narrow your eyes. "You're infuriating, you know that?"

Dick grins wider, clearly satisfied with your response. He leans back in his seat, his arms crossing over his chest.

"Oh, I know," he replies, his tone smug. "But you love it, admit it."

“It sounds like you’re just trying to get me to tell you that.” You shoot him an unimpressed look, which Grayson shoulders almost too easily. He tilts his knee further into your own, seeking out your warmth.

"And if I am?" he responds, that cocky grin still on his face.

Dick leans forward yet again, the proximity between you decreasing with every movement. His intense stare remains unwavering, fixed intently upon your eyes. "Admit that you love it when I tease you," he murmurs, a hint of mischief in his voice, "and I’ll stop."

Dick can barely contain the storm of emotions churning inside him at the thought of you confessing your feelings first. His heart soars with elation and giddiness, his mind spinning with sheer joy. My baby bird. In his mind, he silently pleads say it. Please, just say you love me.

"Yeah, alright. Whatever. So what if I do?" You respond with a reluctant shrug, leaning back against the chair, feigning nonchalance. Dick's heart skips a beat, the nonchalant dismissal causing a surge of excitement within him. It takes all his self-control to contain the overwhelming rush of emotions bubbling up inside.

Dick grins widely in response, the triumph in his voice evident as he gloats. "See? Was that so hard?" he teases. "Admitting that you love my teasing." His smirk widens even further, the cocky satisfaction of knowing he has you wrapped around his finger all too clear.

He moves his elbow onto the table, resting his chin against the palm of his hand as he stares at you intently. A smoldering, almost intense look in his eyes, the playfulness in his tone masking the deeper emotions hidden beneath. "I knew you couldn't resist my charm," he drawls, his voice dropping even lower, filled with a mixture of smugness and possessiveness. You can't help but snort at his arrogance.

“Dick.”

Your voice causes him to pout involuntarily. The way you say it makes him think you're not actually calling out his name, and a frown momentarily mars his features.

No use of y/n, no descriptive features used, no gender mentioned.

Tag list: @zero-s-tea @chemicalsandghosts @yandere-enthusiast @starsdotalk @small-mushroom-fae @wpdarlingpan @dhanyasri @tojislvrr @phoenixgurl030 @mel-star636 @lilyalone @lavender-moony @nickey-diano @sociallyakwardpanda @obsessedwithromance @thickerthanthieves @nckcn @xxrougefangxx @th0rn118 @gaozorous-rex-blog @lyl-3 @wtf-am-i-doing-with-my-life-help @snowy-violets @atsukogikoshi @eyeless-kun @soriansick

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drunkkenobi · 7 months ago

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Hi bb, ty for the prompt to write my thoughts!

So I can't get on tumblr at work anymore unless I go outside to get good signal on my phone so I have only been privy to what's going on here today from friends on discord. So maybe I'm missing some nuance or the what my mutuals think and I apologize in advance for that but I'm going to speak plainly.

This is the only way Watcher is going to survive.

The view counts have been steady through Mystery Files season 2 but they aren't, like, astronomical. A video with a million views nets a channel between $10,000 - $30,000. Guys. That's nothing for Watcher. They have to pay each of their 25+ employees a salary with insurance and benefits and for everything else their channel requires. Steven said in the video today that a season of Ghost Files costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. I don't think everyone is hearing that part and understanding how much money that is, especially compared to many other YouTubers they watch. I'm not an expert on other YouTubers but I look at the Sims people I watch. They are successful with views in the hundred k range because they are a company of one. Themselves and maybe paying a freelancer to help edit their videos. For one person, the stakes are lower and the potential for profit is higher! Especially for gamers that are filming in their homes. YouTubers like this, making niche content on the cheap, are who is going to make it in YouTube now.

Watcher is none of those things. They have, from day one, wanted to make high quality unscripted content. All of their shows are shows. They aren't just "Ryan and Shane do [thing]" or "Steven eats [whatever]". They are shows, like ones you see on cable TV or any streamer. And shows are not cheap. Unscripted is cheaper, sure, than scripted. But that doesn't mean cheap. Especially not with the sheer production value we've seen on all their shows, in particular Ghost Files (hundreds of thousands of dollars). That is how much something like Ghost Adventures costs, which is on Travel Channel, an actual TV network that puts up all those costs.

So. That's why Watcher has to pivot to survive.

I think it's a great idea, personally. And yes, I am in a position where I can financially afford it no problem, which I know is a privilege! I am very lucky in that regard. And I understand that many people are upset they won't see the boys as easily on YouTube anymore. That is valid! But they have openly said they are totally fine with password sharing and I think that's a great way to cut down on costs for some folks. Also right now there's a great deal on the yearly sub for early subscribers. $40 for a year is cheaper than any streaming service and it doesn't go to anyone other than Watcher.

I understand that people feel hurt and blindsided, but I think Watcher is also feeling this too. They have been so excited about this and being able to make whatever they want without having to worry about sponsors and now they're mostly seeing anger directed their way. Especially at Steven. Steven is not rich. You know who's rich? David Zaslav, a man who is single-handedly ruining Warner Brothers and making himself a billionaire while he's at it. THAT is the kind of person we should be directing our anger at streaming prices and quality of the media landscape at. Not one small business that is just trying to survive so they can continue paying their employees.

And one more thing. I've seen folks saying they'd rather watch more ads than pay and while I get that, that's not going to help Watcher make what they want. YouTube famously demonetizes videos with swears which is why I can't watch a video with DRAG QUEENS without every other line being bleeped and Watcher has been so good about not bleeping their content because they know we would hate it. And YouTube does this because of advertisers. Advertisers only want to appeal to the most broad of audiences so that means not supporting anything slightly left of center. Having to deal with ads sucks from the creator perspective and does not help them in the long run.

Anyway, this is all a bit rambling, but these are my thoughts on WatcherTV. I'm extremely excited to subscribe and make them make more Weird Wonderful World. I hope to see you all there.

#watcher #steven lim #ryan bergara #shane madej

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twisting-roads · 23 days ago

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DEBUNKING COMMON RAIN WORLD MISINTERPRETATIONS

The target audience for this was for people who don't know too much about the game as well, so I'm going to explain things that a normal player might already know.

Rain World is known for how it simply throws you into the world with almost no tutorial, and is often praised for it.

But this lack of explanation if you do not go out of your way to find it has also lead to a lot of misinterpretations from those who did not read all the game’s available information, or misunderstood what they were being told. I used to watch some RW lore videos that would explain and summarize these things, and in the past I believed them.

I’ve since stopped doing that after having some time to actually process what I’ve been reading, and I’m here to say...

YOU ARE ALL WRONG ABOUT RAIN WORLD.

Ok, hyperbole. Not everyone believes these, and art can always be interpreted in different ways by different people, and I won’t stop you from having these beliefs. But also, there’s plenty of ingame content which completely disproves most of these unsubstantiated points from those who do not fully research the game before making videos about it.

Looking at you Tale Foundry…

The purpose of this is to pick apart some of the sadly far too common points I’ve heard many times before from Youtube videos, to Tumblr posts, to people I’ve spoken to on Discord.

Starting with my least favorite…

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“The 5 karma were seen as sinful”

Obvious westernization of a game based off fucking Buddhism aside, there’s no ingame text directly supporting this claim. There isn’t any that says otherwise, but we have good reason to believe this isn’t the case.

The 5 natural urges, as they’re sometimes called, were NATURAL. They were what bound you to the cycle. They never worsened your life or made you a terrible person should you keep following them, but an aspect of life on the same level as suffering or ecstasy.

Hey, I’ll break down the 5 karma and their meanings to show you that they're not just "sins"

I believe the natural urges have 2 different meanings: an animalistic one, and a more “human” one.

KARMA 1 This obviously represents violence, as you see one guy stabbing the other. I believe it also represents competition and intense emotions, For example: Artificer experiencing intense grief and lashing out in violence as a result. It was not the violence that started it, but her emotions. (Yes, its Downpour. But it’s a good point.)

KARMA 2

They’re having sex. They’re fucking. They’re- ok you get it. Karma 2 represents reproduction. But, I also believe it’s desire. Joyful bodily experiences, and such. The 2 figures seen here are in a much more playful pose than if they were simply doing this only to reproduce. No, they’re having fun.

KAMRA 3 Connection. Bonding with others. Yet also trade and personal belongings. Attachment to things that are not yourself.

KARMA 4 It’s mentioned ingame that this represents gluttony It’s overindulgence, you know. Similarly to karma 2, it can also be searching for fulfillment. I'm not particularly good at telling what the meaning of this could be.

KARMA 5 Self preservation. Self preservation can come in many forms, from an animal running away from a predator or somebody getting defensive after being accused of something or being threatened, this one is rather vague about its meaning.

I do this to show that the 5 urges have very NEUTRAL meanings. It being positive or negative is entire dependant on context. They’re not sinful, get out of here with that Catholic shit!

The 5 karmas have both positive, negative, and neutral contexts which they can fit into.

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“The ancients hated being alive”

The ancients simply hated the cycle itself and its unknowable properties, as well as being much more aware of things like karma and the urges. Rather, they valued being effortless to disconnect themselves from this cycle.

“This was an eternal dilemma to them - they were burdened by great ambition, yet deeply convinced that striving in itself was an unforgivable vice. They tried very hard to be effortless.” – Bright Green Pearl (DS)

Some practices did of course include things like starving yourself, but as mentioned by Moon, these methods proved to be mostly obsolete. Void Fluid fundamentally changed their culture from what we see. Rather, we do see the ancients enjoying life and valuing it in their own way, which is INCREDIBLY important to some of the games themes, but I’ll get into that later.

"[...]'In this vessel is the living memories of Seventeen Axes, Fifteen Spoked Wheel, of the House of Braids[…] Seventeen Axes, Fifteen Spoked Wheel nobly decided to ascend in the beginning of 1514.008, after graciously donating all (ALL!) earthly possessions to the local Iterator project (Unparalleled Innocence), and left these memories to be cherished by the carnal plane.The assorted memories and qualia include:Watching dust suspended in a ray of sun (Old age). Eating a very tasty meal (Young child). Defeating an opponent in a debate contest, and being applauded by fellow team members (Late childhood/Early adulthood).’...and the list goes on. I'm sorry, little creature, I won't read all of this - the list is six hundred and twenty items long.” – Deep Magenta (SH)

There’s quite a lot to pick apart here, I had to cut down some parts short, but even the cut parts have important details. Just not important enough for me to bring up here.

The Memory Crypts we see ingame are… well where memories are kept. The qualia (personalized experiences) is stored within these mutated fleshy neural organisms referred to as “cabinet beasts”. These of course, contain the “living memories” or qualia of those who have ascended. There are people smarter than me who have already covered these ideas of course, so I won't go TOO indepth.

The ancients greatly valued titles and achievements just as us. They still lived normal lives. As well as this, they valued personal experiences and memories of the carnal realm so much they built an entire citadel to store memories.

As we can see as well, Seventeen Axes has quite a lot of enjoyable memories from throughout their life. Eating nice food and winning a debate contest and getting validation from their peers? That sounds rather… complacent with the 3rd and 4th natural urges, doesn’t it?

I do not believe this screams “I hate being alive!” as much as people have made it out to be, and is honestly ruins part of the game’s messages of compassion and personalized experiences, especially in the game’s ending where Survivor dreams of home.

“You have no name. I once had! I was embalmed, adorned, readied for the journey. So proud. There was jubilation! My name was sung, loud and clear. Did they know? That I didn't quite leave, didn't quite stay? Should I be ashamed? That I linger here, where my memories are kept? Should I be ashamed that I now envy your flesh prison?” - Four Needles under Plentiful Leaves

This is leaning into personal theory territory, but...

I personally believe that the ancients were somewhat terrified of the unpredictability of the cycle and the fact that life would always have more suffering in it.

RW’s religion is heavily based off Buddhism. This is well known of course. The Cycle is a variation of Samsara. Now, I’m not Buddhist, and I’ve tried to do my research about some of these topics. Feel free to correct me, I’m simply going off what I know. (Also I'd love to hear what you have to say regarding your thoughts on the game!)

In Buddhism, each new life you could be taken into the body of an animal, or even end up being tortured in hell for a very, very, VERY long time if you made the wrong decisions, which made escaping it as soon as you could seem like a rather reasonable thing to do.

The ancients never fully grasped the scope of the cycle, and the prospects of having your soul wake up in the body of some miserable worm with no memory of your past or any ideas of your future might’ve seemed bleak.

Suffering is inevitable. But that doesn’t mean they hated being alive, like I said before.

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“Rain World is post-apocalyptic.”

It really isn’t. There was never any apocalypse. The ancients simply left on their own accord, leaving behind their mark on the world that will slowly be buried once again in the ever so present cycle.

“The bones of forgotten civilizations, heaped like so many sticks.” - Two Sprouts, Twelve Brackets

The world is thriving, even. The purposed organisms left behind have evolved and taken over and become it’s own ecosystem.

The iterators are dying though. Dying very slowly, but soon they’ll all decay and everything will move on.

It’s all just another manifestation of the cycle.

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“The creatures in Rain World cannot die”

This is definitely something I hear from people who haven’t played much of the game and only hear about it from outside sources and watch the gameplay.

Yes, it is easy to believe this. As slugcat, when you die, you wake back up again. This is entirely a gameplay thing and not actually related to the lore. Saying this might seem like I'm avoiding the question at hand here, but the rules that apply to you do not seem to apply to other creatures.

Every creature in the game has a 4 integer ID (it can go higher, but not in a standard playthrough).

This makes every creature you see an individual of sorts with its own randomized values or appearance.

As well as this, creatures spawn from specific marked dens. When you kill a creature that spawns from a certain den, the next cycle, that creature’s ID will never appear again. Instead, the den spawn is replaced by a creature of the same species with a different ID, or a new species entirely.

Through gameplay, you see that the respawn rules that apply to you do not apply to other creatures. I’ve heard many points about how these dead creatures are transported to another alternate universe where they are alive, but I really do not want to delve into that theory. You do that yourself.

Excuse my unprofessional language, but this is kind of stupid. Billions and billions of little timeline splits accounting for every single insect and microbe that dies seems far too complex of a solution. Occam's Razor and all that.

With this gameplay element you see, I also want to give LORE explanations as to why this is incredibly stupid.

1) If death had no impact, the 5 natural urges would not matter

If no creatures died, there would be no point in eating (karma 4), competing with other species (karma 1), or any form of self preservation (karma 5). Reproduction (karma 2) has no role and there would be absolutely no reason to do anything any longer. All natural processes would be useless.

2) Light Blue Pearl

The information received from the cycle is most likely from the Light Blue Pearl, found in Outskirts.

“[...]The repeating mantra is important because it symbolizes the cyclical nature of life and death, and the termination verse is a symbol for ascension above and beyond it. I don't know how familiar you are with the nature of life and death, but I imagine like all living creatures you have some intuitive knowledge? Then you know that death isn't the end - birth and death are connected to each other like a ring, or some say a spiral. Some say a spiral that in turn forms a ring. Some ramble in agonizing longevity. But the basis is agreed upon: like sleep like death, you wake up again - whether you want to or not. This is true for all living things, but some actually break the cycle. That doesn't apply to you or me though, you are too entangled in your animal struggles, and for me not breaking that cycle is an integral part of the design. Our mantras keep repeating.”

“Then you know that death isn't the end - birth and death are connected to each other like a ring, or some say a spiral. Some say a spiral that in turn forms a ring.“

This line is very misunderstood. Moon specifically mentions birth and death. She mentions death. She never brings up the notion that nothing truly dies either.

As well as this, Moon says that “some say”, implying that even the ancients weren’t sure what the cycle was either. This is more important to my point regarding how the unfathomable nature of the cycle was why the Ancients were so averse to it from above, though.

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“Sliver of Straw found the solution.”/"There is/isn't solution"

No she didn’t.

Ok fine I’ll explain.

If you’ve played Rain World you know that the purpose of the iterators is to find the solution to the “Great Problem”, the problem of how to ascend ALL living creatures.

You’ll also know Sliver sent out the Triple Affirmative…

“[...]affirmative that a solution has been found, affirmative that the solution is portable, and affirmative that a technical implementation is possible and generally applicable. She's also one of few that has ever been confirmed as exhaustively incapacitated, or dead. We do not die easily.[…]” - Pale Yellow (SL)

After sending out this affirmative, the iterators became conflicted. They never could figure out if she really ascended and had found the solution, or if it was some sort of catastrophic error.

The answer to the Great Problem is clearly intended to be as obscured as possible. There cannot be an answer one way or the other. The themes of it and the endless tolling of the iterators would not be as impactful if we knew there was or wasn’t a solution.

“[...]Either way, after that these different factions developed, as well as a huge forensic effort to recreate and simulate Sliver of Straw's last moments. Some of the simulations were wrapped in a simulation wrapped in a simulation, in case something dangerous might happen. Nothing much has come from it.[…]“ - Pale Yellow (SL)

Here’s my favorite way of explaining what I mean…

Imagine Schrodinger's Cat, the famous thought experiment. There’s a 50/50 chance that when you open the box, you either find the Solution, or find out there is No Solution.

Except you cannot open the box. And the box is entirely theoretical and nobody’s seen it. It seems impossible, but maybe one day you’ll find that box. That’s what the Great Problem is.

Sliver apparently having found the solution would have completely broken everything. Five Pebbles wouldn’t have ended up hurting himself and Moon had Sliver finding the solution been known with certainty. He was taking a shot in the dark.

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“Ascension is akin to suicide.”

I strongly believe this point harms the role that ascension and the void sea play in Rain World’s narrative. Ascension is meant to be a final destination, a goal you build up to and prepare for when you’ve lived every bit of life you possible could, and can now move on.

Bringing up the Memory Crypt pearl from earlier, Seventeen Axes lived an incredibly fulfilling life from what we see, and ascended happily.

As well as this, Buddhism strongly encourages those who wish to liberate themselves to discover their own path, which is also subtly shown through the gameplay, as there are many many routes you can take to Five Pebbles, Looks To The Moon, and The Depths.

I do also think this is why Five Pebbles failed. He tried to brute force his way to ascension.

Suicide implies that ascension is only meant to be a fruitless escape and that it’s wrong to ascend. I… do not want to go into why suicide is bad. It’s a strong topic and I’m just here to talk about video games. But ascension is a neutral thing that you can choose to do or not do and to wait until you’re ready.

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Conclusion...

I really only have the time to cover these 6 misconceptions, and I believe it should be enough. There have been many others I’ve seen, such as the ancients being malicious or that there weren’t any civilizations before them, but there’s not as much to say about them, and they aren’t as common.

Rain World is a very confusing game. I’m not upset at people who think these things to be true, and I do not believe they’re stupid or don’t have any media literacy. I just wish that the people who did actually cover this game did some more looking into it, and actually discussing it with Rain World fans.

Also I should say, that during this entire discussion I have avoided talking about Downpour- RW’s DLC- as it’s more of a official fanmade project. And so much of what it says may not be entirely in line with Vanilla. Because my life isn’t easy and of course there has to be an incredibly divisive and confusing thing like this that I need to avoid bringing up so that way the conversation isn’t muddled.

Thanks if you managed to make it through all this by the way

#txt[]#itref #rw #rain world #rain world lore #rain world ancients

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