#china turned parts

[mixedupmojo]

Weird isekai idea that I had that I just wanted to realise into the wild.

Ok so you know how there are multiple stories out there about reader getting transported into the world of journey to the west and then ending up tagging along as the pilgrims make their way west. Here's the thing most of the time these story's take place once the group has already been assembled or the reader ends up meeting Tripitaka first.

So here's the thought what if reader meets Wukong before the group has a chance to get together. Let me explain.

So imagine reader has just arrived in a strange new world and they have absolutely no clue where they are or how they got there and are freaking out really badly. So they start calling out to see if there is anyone nearby that can help them and after a good few minutes of wandering around and shouting for help they suddenly get a reply. Relived they rush towards the voice, only to find that the person that was calling to them wasn't a person but a monkey that looks to be trapped within the rock of a mountain. And it only takes them a second to realise that this isn't just any monkey but thee monkey, the monkey king, Sun Wukong himself and somehow they've been transported into the story of journey to the west. Their internal crisis soon gets interrupted as Wukong starts asking if they wouldn't mind helping him out with his situation. Knowing the story not to mention what Wukong's capable of they immediately disagree much to Wukong's outrage. At Wukongs outburst they go to leave but that’s when they realise that they still have no clue where they are and what's worse no idea who could help them except for maybe Tripitaka so they resolve to wait for him much to Wukong confusion. Realising that it might not be a good idea to tell him that they are not exactly from this world they stick with the hopelessly lost excuse. which Wukong responds with that he would be happy to help them out if they let him out which is an obvious no so things quickly devolve into a stale mate.

Days go by and they end up talking a lot, with Wukong casually trying to convince them to take off the seal every now and then and them always refusing. But as the days go by the more anxious and worried reader gets after all they have no idea at what point in the story they are and it could very well be a hundred year before Tripitaka will eventually show up. Food and shelter are also a worry as they've managed to get by due to it being summer and there is plenty to forage and a small cave nearby that they've been using for shelter but they know it won't last forever. but most of all they really, really want to go home they miss their family their friends they miss their life. More time goes by and day by day reader and Wukong bond even more to the point where the monkey king has actually grow quite fond of them and cares quite a lot to the point that he starts helping them out in what little ways he can. He even stops constantly trying to get them to remove the seal on the mountain only occasionally asking every now and then and its usually only after he see them struggling, instead he's taking the time to ask them about themselves and find out more about them and in return he tell them about himself usually stories of his glory days. eventually they come clean about the fact that they are not from this world and how they have no idea how they got here or how to get home, breaking down a bit as Wukong resolves to help in any way he can. Then one day it happens completely unprompted reader suddenly get up and start walking away at first Wukong doesn't think anything of it as they often leave to look for food and other such things but as the hours go by and they've yet to come back Wukong starts to worry think that something bad might have happened to them before he gets the horrible thought that they might have just finally got sick of waiting and left him. Stewing in his thought the monkey king slowly growing more and more enrage and heartbroken at the potential betrayal. when suddenly he can feel it, he can feel the mountain shift and he realise what they have done. It's after another few hours pass that he hears them running down the mountain catching a quick sight of them as they run past him. it doesn't take him long to realise that they are getting a safe distance away and he waits a few more hours before he finally breaks free. Meanwhile your despriatly trying to catch your breath as you watch the entire mountain explode chunks of rock flying in all directions and your barely able to make out a reddish orange blur coming towards you before your enveloped in a bone crushing hug.

Thus beings their own journey to find a way to get reader home.

I dunno I just really like the idea of Guanyin or Tripitaka turning up and Wukong not being there and all of haven freaking out because the monkey king is on the loose and no one has any idea where he is.

[nihiltism]

ok so while my ds is getting sand poured into it at alarming rates I'm thinking about how jrpgs in specific have a really weird desync with How Important Death Is. like some address it better than others but it very frequently happens where if you take a step back youll go "am I wild or is everybody just like, Really down with murder in this game". and consequences for said murder, especially in a characterization sense but even just actual physical consequences, don't really happen? unless it's a vehicle for conflict but like. when it is a vehicle for conflict it feels weird because why are These Guys actually taking the fact we killed somebody in broad daylight seriously and coming after us for it while all the other npcs and even the main party took it like it was another saturday evening

see I Think where the issue lies is in the fact that everything is in its own little world when you're in a battle? like. when you fight an enemy and you get leather out of it it's seen as something the enemy Drops and not. their hide. when you defeat a character in a battle it does just feel like you Defeated them. unless there's dialogue afterwards that says otherwise you don't even mentally assume you killed em you just wounded them enough to make them flee or dissolve or whatever. and it's Weird to just. have that assumption there because for a lot of games it really isn't clear if you're killing them or defeating them !!

that last point is extra important when you have the specific brand of Skittish Hero / Noble Hero Who Doesn't Kill People / Rational Hero In Way Over Their Head or whatever where you really don't think they Would kill a guy just to get them out of the way. in that case it's REALLY weird because it's hardly brought up. even if it Is brought up that that guy Sure Did Die the mc doesn't tend to actually have a reaction ??? and I don't know why this is ???? like Any written reaction would be more interesting than nothing even if the guy doesn't have a full on crisis about taking another life having them go "oh shit, The Consequences" would be nice. really anything except (oh cool we can advance the plot now).

I will also mention that Some deaths do matter plot wise but very frequently what makes them matter is how much of it is linked to an in game battle I think. if your mc just finishes a fight and comes back to the overworld and the guy's Disappeared or Dissolved or whatever it means they don't matter. if the guy's still around after the fight it means it's more significant, especially if they're still alive but wounded or Really Shaken Up. because this clears up the indistinguishable line between if a battle is lethal or not and if a character decides to deal a finishing blow now it's Way more telling of their character. even though this is basically the same thing that happened in the (killed In A Battle) scenario. just with more dialogue. I will also mention that the person who deals the finishing blow is Rarely Ever that good hearted protagonist and often they'll even go :0 at somebody else committing a murder despite them instigating and helping murder quite a few people. just. In Battle. so it's less bad. I guess.

this is leaving out the fact that in party deaths are often a Major Major Blow because like. ok that's fair. that's A Guy You Knew that's understandable. anyway I don't really know where I'm going with this I just think it's interesting how in these types of games death can swap from not mattering at all to mattering a Lot and if u don't think about it too hard u don't even question it. I'll probably be putting some examples in the tags idk

[puthyflapps]

Gosh, another handsome boy in your life.

They used to tear up the town together

[runesinthenight]

There are guides for how to go to a protest in a way that is less likely to endanger you. Note: I did not say safe. You can go to a protest where all you do is hold signs and yell about injustices. And police may show up with water canons and rubber bullets.

One of our first amendment rights is the freedom of speech, including the right to peaceful assembly.

But people are still getting shot and arrested and fearing for their safety and the safety of their families if they protest. People were getting arrested for protesting the anti-trans laws in Tennessee! We had children, literal children! Called "insurrectionists" because they dared use their 1st amendment rights to protest for gun control because they don't want to go to school scared that someone may shoot them in classes.

I grew up in this country. I have generations of ancestors who fought and died for this country. I have ancestors who fought to create this country. That is ancestry that I am proud of.

I am not proud of my country.

[no-passaran]

Genocide experts warn that India is about to genocide the Shompen people

Who are the Shompen?

The Shompen are an indigenous culture that lives in the Great Nicobar Island, which is nowadays owned by India. The Shompen and their ancestors are believed to have been living in this island for around 10,000 years. Like other tribes in the nearby islands, the Shompen are isolated from the rest of the world, as they chose to be left alone, with the exception of a few members who occasionally take part in exchanges with foreigners and go on quarantine before returning to their tribe. There are between 100 and 400 Shompen people, who are hunter-gatherers and nomadic agricultors and rely on their island's rainforest for survival.

Why is there risk of genocide?

India has announced a huge construction mega-project that will completely change the Great Nicobar Island to turn it into "the Hong Kong of India".

Nowadays, the island has 8,500 inhabitants, and over 95% of its surface is made up of national parks, protected forests and tribal reserve areas. Much of the island is covered by the Great Nicobar Biosphere Reserve, described by UNESCO as covering “unique and threatened tropical evergreen forest ecosystems. It is home to very rich ecosystems, including 650 species of angiosperms, ferns, gymnosperms, and bryophytes, among others. In terms of fauna, there are over 1800 species, some of which are endemic to this area. It has one of the best-preserved tropical rain forests in the world.”

The Indian project aims to destroy this natural environment to create an international shipping terminal with the capacity to handle 14.2 million TEUs (unit of cargo capacity), an international airport that will handle a peak hour traffic of 4,000 passengers and that will be used as a joint civilian-military airport under the control of the Indian Navy, a gas and solar power plant, a military base, an industrial park, and townships aimed at bringing in tourism, including commercial, industrial and residential zones as well as other tourism-related activities.

This project means the destruction of the island's pristine rainforests, as it involves cutting down over 852,000 trees and endangers the local fauna such as leatherback turtles, saltwater crocodiles, Nicobar crab-eating macaque and migratory birds. The erosion resulting from deforestation will be huge in this highly-seismic area. Experts also warn about the effects that this project will have on local flora and fauna as a result of pollution from the terminal project, coastal surface runoff, ballasts from ships, physical collisions with ships, coastal construction, oil spills, etc.

The indigenous people are not only affected because their environment and food source will be destroyed. On top of this, the demographic change will be a catastrophe for them. After the creation of this project, the Great Nicobar Island -which now has 8,500 inhabitants- will receive a population of 650,000 settlers. Remember that the Shompen and Nicobarese people who live on this island are isolated, which means they do not have an immune system that can resist outsider illnesses. Academics believe they could die of disease if they come in contact with outsiders (think of the arrival of Europeans to the Americas after Christopher Columbus and the way that common European illnesses were lethal for indigenous Americans with no immunization against them).

And on top of all of this, the project might destroy the environment and the indigenous people just to turn out to be useless and sooner or later be abandoned. The naturalist Uday Mondal explains that “after all the destruction, the financial viability of the project remains questionable as all the construction material will have to be shipped to this remote island and it will have to compete with already well-established ports.” However, this project is important to India because they want to use the island as a military and commercial post to stop China's expansion in the region, since the Nicobar islands are located on one of the world's busiest sea routes.

Last year, 70 former government officials and ambassadors wrote to the Indian president saying the project would “virtually destroy the unique ecology of this island and the habitat of vulnerable tribal groups”. India's response has been to say that the indigenous tribes will be relocated "if needed", but that doesn't solve the problem. As a spokesperson for human rights group Survival International said: “The Shompen are nomadic and have clearly defined territories. Four of their semi-permanent settlements are set to be directly devastated by the project, along with their southern hunting and foraging territories. The Shompen will undoubtedly try to move away from the area destroyed, but there will be little space for them to go. To avoid a genocide, this deadly mega-project must be scrapped.”

On 7 February 2024, 39 scholars from 13 countries published an open letter to the Indian president warning that “If the project goes ahead, even in a limited form, we believe it will be a death sentence for the Shompen, tantamount to the international crime of genocide.”

How to help

The NGO Survival International has launched this campaign:

From this site, you just need to add your name and email and you will send an email to India's Tribal Affairs Minister and to the companies currently vying to build the first stage of the project.

Share it with your friends and acquittances and on social media.

Sources:

India’s plan for untouched Nicobar isles will be ‘death sentence’ for isolated tribe, 7 Feb 2024. The Guardian.

‘It will destroy them’: Indian mega-development could cause ‘genocide’ and ‘ecocide’, says charity, 8 Feb 2024. Geographical.

Genocide experts call on India's government to scrap the Great Nicobar mega-project, Feb 2024. Survival International.

The container terminal that could sink the Great Nicobar Island, 20 July 2022. Mongabay.

[Maps] Environmental path cleared for Great Nicobar mega project, 10 Oct 2022. Mongabay.

[trainsinanime]

I wonder: Do Americans know about american school buses? Not their existence in general, but how they're seen overseas.

Over here, they're one of the symbols of America, on par with the Statue of Liberty, the flag, the Eagle, and well ahead of any chain restaurant you can name. People won't know any US states, but they will know these vehicles.

The thing is, here in Germany, we don't have dedicated school buses. The general idea is that kids go to school on their own. When that's not practical, they're expected to use (and given free tickets for) public transit. Public transit is designed around this requirement; there are many places where there is a bus, and anyone can get on it, but the route and timetable really only makes sense for school children. In case a dedicated school bus is really needed, that's generally subcontracted out, and the lines either use something like a Sprinter Van for smaller routes, or a normal city or interurban bus (often a used one that's a bit older). School trips are normal public transit, or a rented bus, typically a coach or regional bus.

It's not a perfect system, in the past couple of years there's been an epidemic of people bringing their kids to school in their cars instead of letting them walk, which is less than ideal. It is what it is. But building a dedicated network of public transit lines only for students, and building dedicated vehicles only for that, has never occurred to anyone here.

Of course we know about these buses, from movies and such, but they're as foreign here as cacti or pick-up trucks (actually we're seeing more and more of these here) or yellow cabs (all europeans will assume all cabs in the US are yellow until they actually visit).

You do see these buses here at times, because people still generally like the idea of the US, even if they have a lot of issues with a lot of details, and so folks bring them over, along with stretch limos and stuff (also not really a thing here). And of course, if someone goes to all that trouble, they don't do it to haul school kids, they rent it out for city tours or as a party bus or whatever.

So you see these yellow things as a symbol of faraway places, scenic vistas, some vague undefined idea of freedom that doesn't necessarily hold up to any contact with reality, and it's just a huge part of the whole US aesthetic.

And then you go to a student exchange with the US, and you finally get the chance: You yourself get to ride in one of these iconic chrome yellow buses! It looks just like in the movies! You get in, you drive in them a little…

…and you realise they're shit. Just the worst buses in the western world. Terrible suspension. Uncomfortable seats with weirdly high backs (so they don't have to put seatbelts in, they just restrict how far kids can fly in an accident). Everything made out of the cheapest materials. Turns out the reason why the US uses school buses like that instead of normal modern city buses, which the US has, is to save money and because they just hate kids.

And then it hits you why US Americans say "as American as apple pie", a dish that is made and enjoyed literally anywhere in the world, instead of "as American as yellow school buses". Of course the Americans already knew all this. They got tortured by these things forever. It would never occur to them to see this as a symbol of America, it's just a normal part of life for them. It's a symbol of school and school life and sometimes normalcy, and tells us that these actors getting out of it are supposed to be teenagers, nothing more.

But most people in Europe have, of course, never ridden on these buses. So when they see them in movies and TV, that's a giant big yellow signifier that we're not in Hessen or Wallonia or wherever anymore. A symbol of a different world, one that may be at most a once-in-a-lifetime-experience for most people, just like a picture of a tropical beach, Mayan Pyramids, the Great Wall of China, or Hildesheim (there's no reason to go there twice). And I think Americans don't know that, and that's fascinating.

[neverendingford]

.

[niteshade925]

April 20, Beijing, China, National Museum of China/中国国家博物馆 (Part 1 - Dehua white porcelain exhibition/德化白瓷展):

Aaand finally, the National Museum of China/中国国家博物馆! I was lucky enough to see the famed Dehua white porcelain exhibition/德化白瓷展 here. Some of you may recognize some of these pieces already, since pictures and shorts of them have been circulating online way before I went on this trip, but there are many many other pieces too. The pieces I post here are only a small portion of the entire exhibition, so if you ever get a chance to see the exhibition elsewhere in person, don't hesitate. This stuff is amazing.

First up is one of the two that has been gaining popularity online, the piece named 神话 or "Legend".

The first time I saw a porcelain piece like this, I thought that the clothing part was made with paper? But no, the light fabric of the clothing, the hair, it's all porcelain. Keep in mind when looking through these pictures: every part of every piece is porcelain.

This piece is the other one that was becoming popular, the piece named simply 纸, or "Paper". If you don't look up close and see the glossy surface, you can't tell it's actually porcelain. I cannot for the life of me imagine the kind of magic that was used to turn clay into this

Anyway, this is a good point to introduce Dehua porcelain a little bit. Dehua porcelain is a regional specialty of Dehua/德化, which is located in Fujian province, and is known for its expressiveness and white color. For this reason it's also known in the West as "Blanc de Chine" (French: "white of China"), and this should be the reason why this exhibition is named 中国白, which basically means the same thing. The history of Dehua porcelain goes back to Song dynasty (960 - 1279), and it is still being produced today. Many of the pieces I'm posting here are modern pieces.

But Dehua white porcelain can be colored too (I imagine the color must be painted on later, because the white comes from the clay itself), and when it is colored, it looks like it came right out of a painting

This piece is especially amazing to me. Look at the texture, look at those details. Zoom in and you will find that there are actually a bunch of porcelain ants on this porcelain tree stump. Porcelain ants. I never expected to use porcelain as an adjective when describing ants. Wtf. It's like a manifestation of a scene from an older animated movie.

Peanuts are called 花生 in Chinese, which literally means "flower grow", and because it also has a long shelf life, it symbolizes longevity and a happy marriage. Also a fun fact: because Watson of Sherlock Holmes is usually phoenetically translated as 华生 (huá shēng) in Chinese and sounds similar to 花生 (huā shēng), you will find that many in the Chinese SH fandom refers to Watson as "peanut".

This piece is titled 春色满园, or "garden filled with spring scenery". This is also a common 4-character word used to describe gardens in spring. I'm guessing the figure depicted here is one of the flower gods. It is one of my personal favorites because of its superb depiction of movement, it's as if the flower god will really fly away on clouds at any moment

More depictions of traditional Chinese deities, specifically Chang'e/嫦娥, the moon goddess. That moon rabbit is too cute.

Depictions of what I'm assuming is the Four Heavenly Kings/四大天王, based on the items they are holding. The Four Heavenly Kings are Buddhist deities.

Look at her clothing! That porcelain is so thin it's almost see-through! Also is it depicting Li Qingzhao/李清照, the famous female poet from Song dynasty? She does have a famous ci poem that's about paddling a boat in a lake full of lotuses while drunk

The piece titled 锦绣前程, or "future as vibrant and prosperous as silk brocade". This is also a common 4-character word used in well wishing. The figure in this piece is holding a xiuqiu/绣球, a ball made of silk, which was usually seen as a token of love

Somewhat more modern-themed pieces:

Among the hundreds of amazing pieces, this one caught my attention for its unique texture. When everyone else was trying to turn the clay into these thin sheets representing fabric or paper or flower petals, this artist took the noodle approach. Not many visitors seemed to like it, but I think it's pretty cool

Piece titled 运势如虹, or "fortune like the rainbow", also a 4-character word used in well wishing. Traditionally horses symbolize vitality and success, hence why many people use the words 马到成功 ("horse's arrival brings success") and 龙马精神 ("vitality of dragons and horses") in well wishes during Year of the Horse

Stay tuned for Part 2 of the Dehua white porcelain exhibition!

[nereidprinc3ss]

you know the killer doesn't understand

in which spencer is so terrified he's going to hurt you after he gets out of prison that he can barely touch you. an argument ensues.

angst (+ comfort) warnings/tags: established relationship, fem!reader, mentions of violent intrusive thoughts (non-specific), arguing, yelling, use of the word rape, nightmares, happyish ending, mention of showering together, it's a bad time but it's also a good time for us woo i love angsty angst a/n: i miss posting for real so bad i dug up this draft which was mostly finished and polished it up. i think i really like this one and it was based on a request but i lost it:( i hope u guys enjoy this, pls lmk<3

Spencer is by no means happy with his sudden fear of touching you—it makes everything in his life significantly harder and less convenient and he hates that he’s constantly afraid he’s going to break you. He hates watching you hold back from attacking him with a hug when he enters a room like you used to, and he feels terrible every time you ball up on the opposite side of the couch as he reads, waiting for an invitation into his lap but too scared to ask for one (he’ll always hold out his arm for you, though—he’s not cruel.)

You’re adorable in the way you stand at the foot of the bed in your pajamas, arms behind your back like it’s not your bed too, but it makes him feel terrible. This isn’t at all what he wanted for you, and in all honestly he’s thought about ending the relationship because he knows he’s being an absolutely awful partner—but he just can’t bring himself to. Instead, he gestures for you to get into bed, and you curl up under the covers close to him but not against him, and he’ll play with your hair and read for a while because he can’t sleep very well. Eventually he’ll assume the position of sleep, but some sick part of him doesn’t know what to do with the sounds of the city and the fan instead of the sounds of a hundred men rolling and sniffing and shuffling around their echoey cells. He doesn’t understand warmth anymore, or softness, or nice pajamas or fluffy pillows. He’s starting to think he doesn’t understand you. And that’s the worst thought of all. 

So he essentially dozes for the first week, on and off, always exhausted in the mornings but what’s new. When he can’t sleep, he turns his head to watch you breathe—some beautiful, sweet creature dreaming in his bed, unwaveringly loyal to him even though he can hardly stand to touch you for fuck’s sake. You’re beautiful, and it makes him feel better to watch you, even if he can’t touch you. Not now that he knows what he is capable of doing to another person. What if he has some sort of PTSD—PTSS, thank you, Luke Alvez—induced dream and does something terrible to you in his sleep? It’s not like you’re tiny, but he’s stronger, he knows he is, and lately every time you get too close he remembers exactly what it feels like to exert the full force of that strength, and what it feels like when someone else unleashes their own onto him. 

They’re just intrusive thoughts, and in them he doesn’t hurt you intentionally, but he always feels a little bit sick now. He is so, so sick. A bull in a China shop. Spencer knows exactly how breakable humans are—it’s his job to know. If he left so much as one red mark on you by accident, he’s quite sure he’d drill down to a previously unknown rock bottom. And if he reaches that point, he doesn’t know if he’d ever deserve to come back. 

Every day it seems to become clearer that the only humane thing to do is break up with you. But for now he’ll watch you sleep—the delicate rising and falling of your chest, the way you curl in on yourself because you can’t curl into him. In sleep you look so peaceful and content. You never look that way awake, anymore. Not when he’s around, which is pretty much always. At least he can’t disappoint you while you’re asleep. 

Or so he’d like to think. 

Until one night, about a week and a half after he gets home; you whimper in your sleep. It’s so quiet he could’ve missed it, but he doesn’t, and then he watches your smooth brow furrow with worry and he knows you’re having a nightmare immediately. 

Spencer panics—before, he would have woken you up and held you and comforted you until you fell back asleep and it would have been so simple. Now he’s frozen, afraid to touch you but not sure if he can just lie there watching you so afraid and not do a thing about it. 

In the end, you choose for him—and it only takes a few moments. You’re close enough to him that it’s easy for you to close the few inches even in sleep, and maybe you’re slightly conscious but not enough to remember you’re not supposed to touch him. 

He stops breathing as you fold yourself against him, muttering worried nonsense—he catches his name, once—nestling against his chest, one searching arm gently draping over his waist. Every muscle in his body is rigid, and his thoughts—his mind goes… completely fucking blank. 

Suddenly, all he’s known, all he’s ever known, is the smell of your hair, the warmth of you seeping through layers of clothing, and the weight of your arm over him. Everything he ever was ceases to exist, and he’s just this, right now. The person you’d turned to unconsciously for comfort, so sure, so trusting that he would keep you safe. He can feel your breath for the first time in months. Slowly every tense muscle unspools. For the first time in a long time he doesn’t feel dangerous. He doesn’t feel like his entire body is spring loaded and ready to attack at the slightest provocation. Spencer allows himself to hold you, and part of it feels like betrayal because he knows how badly you need this from him while you’re awake but mostly he feels like he could cry. His thumb rubs circles into the middle of your back and your head tucks so perfectly under his chin while he studies the rumpled sheets where you’d been lying a moment ago. He almost feels like sticking his tongue out to gloat at your half of the mattress—haha, look who gets to hold her now—but instead he sighs, shakily, and squeezes his eyes shut. 

You don’t make another sound for hours. 

He’s reluctant to let you go when you begin to stir around six AM, but forcibly holding onto you is so far from what he wants to do that he manages. You roll back over to your own side of the bed, and he continues admiring you from afar until he falls asleep. It’s the best three hours of sleep he’s had in a very long time. 

Of course, you don’t remember it. When you wake up your sadness resumes, and so does the pretending like you’re not sad, but you’re a very good sport—and it helps that he’s feeling much better this morning than he has since he got back. 

“Good morning,” you whisper faintly, still blinking as you watch him longingly from your spot. 

Spencer pushes himself up onto an elbow, and you watch with big eyes as he leans over you, stroking your cheek with his free hand. 

“Good morning. You sleep okay?”

Your brow flickers, and he realizes it’s not a question he asks every morning, and you’re probably distracted by this overt display of affection, but you answer it obediently anyway. 

“I think so. I had weird dreams.”

He hums. 

“About what?”

It’s quiet for a moment as he takes in the exact spattering of microscopically fractured pigment over your irises. Your voice is small when you finally speak. 

“Do I have to tell you?”

That hurts. 

“No. But it might help.”

Coming from him? Ironic doesn’t even begin to cover it. 

You acknowledge him with a small hum of your own, studying him with soft, mistrustful eyes. 

He can’t help it anymore—Spencer leans down and gently kisses you, so tenderly, so chastely, it makes his own head spin. He hasn’t kissed you like that since you picked him up from Milburn. It’s long overdue. 

Which is why he’s not expecting you to start crying. He pulls back immediately, not far, just enough to assess your expression. 

“What’s this? What’s wrong, angel?” He frowns. Your lip quivers in a way that feels like a blow to the chest. 

“That’s not… you’re…”

“What? What is it?”

A fat tear finally traces a path down your cheek and when you speak your voice breaks in the most fragile, devastating way. 

“You’re not being fair.”

He has no neat question to summarize all the bafflement your accusation inspires in his lately cloudy head, but the wildly confused look on his face must be prompt enough.

“I’m trying really hard to respect your space and boundaries and not upset you but my feelings are hurt, Spencer, I don’t know how they couldn’t be. I feel like you don’t even like me anymore. I’m embarrassed around you because I feel like I care about you so much more than you care about me. And then you—and then you wake up one morning and you think it’s okay to act like you love me again but I can’t—I c—” you stop, obviously frustrated—now crying in earnest and lacking the words. “You can’t be mean to me. I know you’ve been through a lot and I’m sorry but you can’t treat me like that. I’m a person, too.”

His chest aches and he swallows down barbed wire.

“I’m not acting like I love you. I do love you. More than I’ve ever loved anyone or anything in my life. That’s not an act.”

It’s not an adequate response, but your words are still spinning in his head until he can’t keep up with them. He’s not used to this, anymore. The language you two had developed is so foreign now. 

Maybe he just doesn’t know how to talk to you. 

Resignation—a too-calm recognition softens the stormy look that has brewed on your face. As soon as it’s gone, and you’re looking at him placidly, he realizes he’s afraid. 

“Well, that’s not enough,” you whisper. 

Spencer feels like he’s been shot as you push the covers aside and slip out of bed. And he knows what that feels like. 

“Where are you going?” And then louder, when you don’t hear him because you’ve already left the room, “Where are you going?”

He follows you through the apartment as you march purposefully for the door, slipping shoes on and grabbing your keys and coat. 

You barely look over your shoulder as you leave, slamming the front door behind you. Things shake from the impact. A mini earthquake. 

Spencer is too stunned to follow you. 

It’s not until a few minutes later when he goes to call you that he realizes your phone is still sitting on your bedside table. He stares at it, tasting metal, because he has absolutely no way to reach you or guarantee your safety. There’s no way for you to call him, or anyone, if you get in trouble—and he fears that you’ll retaliate against him by doing something stupid and dangerous. 

He only just manages to stop himself from calling the police and asking them to start looking for you. Only just recognizes it to be an overreaction. 

Besides, he’s not feeling particularly fond of the criminal justice institution these days. If it came down to it, he’d trust himself and his team over the cops any day.

The team. They’re always a resource. If worst comes to worst, he thinks, robotically making coffee as he tries to talk himself down, and she doesn’t come home before dark, I’ll call all of her closest friends. If she doesn’t come home before the morning—the thought makes him feel sick—I’ll deploy every fucking resource at my disposal. 

Maybe that’s an overreaction, too, but he has to find a way to self-soothe somehow. Planning makes him feel better. Being prepared for the things you never see coming makes him feel better. It’s impossible, of course—but the illusion of control is stubborn and so seductive. 

Thankfully, it doesn��t come to that. 

At around 2 PM, he receives a couple of texts from Garcia that are a massive relief. 

Penelope: She’s at my apartment

Penelope: BE NICER TO YOUR GIRLFRIEND!!!!!!!

The series of emojis that follow (including an octopus?), he doesn’t even try to decipher. He simply drops his phone and sighs deeply into his hands, releasing an extreme amount of paranoid tension that had been tying him into knots. Lately, he’s had this sense that everything is fleeting—that the things he takes for granted are painfully, violently impermanent. It doesn’t take anyone with a degree to figure out why he’s been feeling that way, but it’s so all-consuming he’s not sure how to cope with it. Just a few days ago, he’d been wondering how to break up with you. Now he’s asking himself how the fuck he thought he’d be able to do that when he’s barely functioning after a few hours without you.

It’s a question he still hasn’t answered by the time the front door opens at 10 PM. It’s clear by the deer-in-headlights look on your face that you hadn’t been expecting him like this—leaning over the counter, half-empty mug by his hand, staring at nothing in particular and waiting for you to come home. Neither of you have changed clothing since this morning—not that you could—but you look apprehensive as you close it behind you, never facing away from him. The whole thing is like a teenager being caught sneaking back in by a weary parent. 

For a moment the silent confrontation stretches into the horizon, a non-specific point as neither of you seem inclined to be the first to talk. You just watch him watching you—leaning against the door rigidly as if you can’t get far enough away. But he’s too tired for this. Too worn out. 

“How’d you get home?”

You swallow. 

“Penelope.”

Spencer nods slowly, rolling his bottom lip between teeth and finally looking away. 

“You really should have brought your phone.”

You scoff, peeling yourself from the door. 

“Of course that’s what you’re worried about.”

It’s the same situation as this morning, but in reverse—him following after you down the hall as you storm toward the bedroom. 

“Wh—should I not have been? You scared me—” he says your name, barely catching the door before it can slam in his face. “I was worried about you.”

“Why?” you face him, laughing bewilderedly as if the situation were at all funny. A kind of manic energy crackles from the surface of your skin and in your eyes that renders him unable to think of a reply. “Because you thought I would get raped and murdered and then you’d be sad?”

“Yes!” Spencer yells, eyes widening as he fails to contain his frustration any longer. “That is fucking exactly why I was scared!”

You step forward, getting in his space. It jars him, momentarily—he wants to get away from you. Being angry and so close to you is terrifying. What if he lashes out? What if he hurts you? He’s seen crimes of passion. His blood is freezing in his veins. 

“Of course you didn’t give one single fuck that I left you. You didn’t think for one fucking second that I might be tired of this. That wasn’t what you were scared of at all.” For every inch you near, he backs away. Another scorned, bitter laugh from you that feels like poison coursing through his entire circulatory system. You notice everything, eyeing him up and down as he cowers from you. “What is this, Spencer? If you hate being near me that much, just fucking break up with me.”

You’re close enough that he can see the tears welling in your eyes, but he’d know they were there even if he couldn’t observe them. He would hear it in your voice. He would feel it. But he can’t do anything about it. Right now, he’s paralyzed. 

“If the only thing holding you back is wanting to spare my feelings, just fucking do it. This isn’t better. I don’t give a fuck if it’s hard for you. It’s hard for me, too, but I’m not just going to ignore it anymore.”

There’s no more room. The wall is at is back. 

“Honey, please back up,” Spencer breathes. Last time his back was to a wall, he’d been gagged and beaten. Don’t lash out. She never hurt you. It wasn’t her. 

“Don’t tell me what to do!” you shout, as tears begin to spill over your cheeks. “Either break up with me or stop telling me to go away!”

At that moment, as you break down and your words become muddled with sobs, you raise your fist. 

Spencer watches it approach his shoulder as if in slow-motion. 

On instinct, he catches your wrist.

There’s a lull as he waits for something to explode, for something to go terribly, deeply wrong—

But it doesn’t. 

He realizes his grip is gentle. He realizes you’d never actually hurt him like that. He realizes how little resistance he’d found when he stopped what was sure to be nothing more than a petulant, petty bump against his shoulder—a maneuver that wouldn’t have hurt in the slightest. It was nothing more than a desolate, childlike display of feelings bigger than you know what to do with. 

In the second that it takes him to realize all of this, to realize he is not endangering you in the slightest, nor you him, you’ve begun to truly sob. Standing just inches from him, head angled down as he holds your wrist carefully, you are the picture of a girl who has been running on empty for a very long time and has nothing left to give. Spencer twines his arms around you, tucking your head under his chin and slowly rubbing your back like he’d never forgotten how to hold you. It stuns you, and the tears pause for just a second—before you’re wrapping desperate, weakened arms around him and sobbing even harder, albeit silently, into his shirt. 

“I don’t want to break up,” he whispers, his own voice shaky with understated emotion. “I’m sorry. Please don’t say that. I don’t want that.”

“What’s wrong with you?” You cry, a desperate plead caught between sobs that wrack your body against his against the wall. And he knows it’s not an accusation. It’s not an insult. It’s a question borne of confusion and fear. It’s what a child might ask a sick dog while tears stream down feverish cheeks. And it’s completely appropriate, considering he never tells you anything anymore and he’s only just realizing how scary that must be. Spencer is back from prison but you may as well still be living alone for all that you know about him. He tangles a hand in your hair and holds you against his chest, breathing you like nitrous oxide. 

“I don’t know,” he whispers. The room beyond blurs as he stares at nothing, focused only on the tingly euphoria of feeling you under his hands clashing with the ever-present and crushing shame that he couldn't do it sooner. “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

“I don’t want you—to be sorry.” Shuddering breaths and gasps still cleave your sentences in half, and Spencer listens so intently he thinks there might be harmonics hidden in the layers of your voice. He clings to every syllable like you’re wielding the word of god in a five-foot-something body. “I just miss you so m—much. I want you to—to love me.”

“I do,” he promises immediately, lips pressing to your ear. “I do love you. So much. So much.”

When you don’t respond, he’s not exactly surprised. He almost asks what he can do, what you need—but is quite sure that’s not the right move. Instead he doesn’t say a thing. Only holds you.

Later, you’ll pull back and he’ll swim in your teary gaze, and then kiss you. He’ll trace silent apologies into every inch of your skin under the torrent of the shower, and he’ll do whatever it takes to make you understand. But for now, for the first time in months, you’re holding each other, and that’s all either of you need.  

[mxmparts]

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[luveline]

spencer x reader where she kisses his forehead and he’s 🥹🥹

“Spencer, are you dead?” 

Spencer ignores your question by accident. Heavy head in hand, he’s slowly sinking closer and closer to the hotel breakfast table to rest. His neck twinges with the effort it takes to stay up. 

“Spencer,” you say more sharply. 

His eyes track like the air is honey. He settles on your sluggishly while offering no greeting, tiredness pulling at him. “My eyes hurt,” he offers. 

“Make you some tea.” 

“Um, okay.” He’s disappointed when you leave, then dozing, face pressed to his desk as itchy eyes press along lids. It feels as though his eyelashes have turned inward. 

You return with a cup. Spencer grabs it blindly, lifts his head to squint one eye open. “What?” he asks. 

There isn’t tea in the cup. There are tea bags, two of them, wetted and leaking tan beige along the white china of the mug. Distinctly no tea. You must be tired too. 

“They’re for your eyes, Spence. They’ll make your eyes hurt less. The caffeine restricts your blood vessels to calm the inflammation, and the tea itself soothes sore skin.” 

“How do you know that?” he asks. 

You rest a hand on his shoulder. “I read about it in a book of modern home remedies. It really works. Here, can you tip your head back?” 

Spencer is very, very tired, but your voice is nice, your fingertips gentle against his neck, so he tips his head back. He doesn’t know how terrible he looks, having forgotten his untucked shirt, his rumpled sweater vest, his hair sticking up all over the place. 

“Close your eyes,” you murmur. 

Spencer shuts them. 

“It’s cold,” you warn, “but it’ll feel nice.” 

Spencer doesn’t care. He waits for you to move. The tea bags you place on his closed eyes feel cold and at first they sting just a touch, perhaps tea finding its way through his lashes, and he can’t confess to noticing a difference in soreness. 

“Hey… what’s this? It looks like it hurts?” you ask, drawing a short line over the side of the bridge of his nose. There’s an indent there that feels like a bruise.

“I fell asleep at my desk with my glasses on,” he says. “They dug in.” 

“You were up late, I’m guessing. Maybe you should go back to the room.” 

“No, I can’t. I’ll be okay. Thank you for the… tea.” 

Your hand rests tentatively against his cheek. He can’t open his eyes to see what you're feeling, and he doesn’t need to. There’s emotion to be felt in your slow strokes, how your thumb rests along his jaw as your nail scratches to the top of his ear, then behind the shell of it. It’s intimate enough to summon a different kind of tiredness. Exhaustion swapped for content. He could sleep in the curve of your palm all day. 

“You’re welcome,” you say. “I’m gonna take them off for a second to check the damage.” 

You take them. Your breath draws near. 

A warmth presses to his forehead atop his left eyebrow. Spencer doesn’t know what it is until your nose graces just above it, and your lips part —it’s a kiss. You’re kissing him sweetly, your fingers sewing through his hair. 

He peels his sore eyes open to look at you. You lean back as unhurried as you’d ferried forward, your hand cradling the nape of his neck. 

“Are you sure you’re okay?” you ask. 

Spencer stares up at you. In that moment, tired, aching, and balmed, he’s completely in love with you. You must see a little of it, your lips parting again in an unnamed emotion. It’s sheer luck that you’re the only one awake with him, because if any of his teammates saw the way he was looking at you they’d never let him forget it. And, he gets to see your reaction. Your partial smile. 

“Did that help?” you ask. 

You must mean the tea. “I feel better.” 

“Yeah? Do you…” Your voice turns to cashmere, a thread of bemusement tugging at the corner of your mouth. “Would another one be okay?” 

Spencer can only nod as you wrap your arms around him and position your mouth at the soft skin where his hair meets his forehead. When you kiss him again, his eyes flutter shut. 

“You really need some help with your insomnia,” you murmur. 

Spencer wonders if maybe you’d want to be that help. You must have melatonin in your kisses.

[swordsandholly]

Comfort Creator

Ghost who downloads tiktok only because Soap and Gaz made him so they could send him memes. He hates the app. Thinks everyone on it is just talking way too much about nothing. Finds the consumerism and attention seeking to be beyond annoying.

Ghost who still finds himself scrolling when he needs a mental break from paperwork.

Eventually, he realizes he keeps getting fed this one creator’s videos. It’s the tea reviews that reel him in. They’re nothing special, just them sitting in front of the camera sipping on some artesian tea while chatting about their day and the flavors.

Before long, though, he’s watching all their content. From random rambles to outfit videos to movie talks. They just have a very soothing voice is all. Nothing to do with their pretty face or obviously too-kind disposition. A sweet little thing; so unlike him.

He officially follows three people now.

The thing about Ghost is, he doesn’t sleep. Well, he does, but it’s either like the dead when he’s exhausted himself beyond what his body can handle or fraught with nightmares. He isn’t sure what compels him to do it the first time, but Ghost puts on his their tea review playlist; just lets it play through while he lays in bed. He’s never slept so well. Somehow their voice just makes everything else quiet - like it flips a switch in some primal part of his brain.

At some point he comes across the term “comfort creator” and realizes that’s exactly what he’s got.

A few months pass and Ghost finds himself on medical leave with absolutely nothing to do and all the time in the world. He decides to try some of tea his favorite little creator has reviewed - even some of the bad ones, just to see if he agrees. Maybe he’ll find a new favorite to keep on base.

He makes his way to a local high-end tea shop. All loose leaf and custom blends from various brands and places around the world. He’s far too aware of how out of place he looks - a hulking man in all black and an arm cast in this frilly little shop. A real bull in a china shop.

Ghost’s back goes ram rod straight when an all too familiar voice tries to get his attention. He turns comically slowly, heart pounding in his ears. There they are, tapping his arm and asking if he’ll be so kind as to get that strawberry rose blend down from the top shelf that’s just out of reach. He does, of course, spluttering through an awkward “you’re welcome” and kicking himself when they scamper away to the register before he can introduce himself.

But now he knows they’re close, a shop they must frequent, and has plenty of time on leave. All he has to do is find the right opportunity to make proper conversation. How hard could that be?

[cheriladycl01]

Kinktober 11/10/2024 Oscar Piastri- Somnophilia

Plot: You and Oscar never have linked up sleep schedules so you’re often asleep when he comes home. And he just needs you so desperately…

Warnings: Kinktober, SMUT, Somnophilia, p in v, sex while asleep, 18+ Minors DNI

You and Oscar never had linked up sleep schedules, it was awful. If you had jobs to do at home over a race weekend especially one out of your time zone Oscar would be coming home at 3am, when you were already asleep.

After Australia, Japan and China all being together and him not coming back to the UK and you being incredibly busy not being able to go to him. He was getting home at 3am, yet he wasn’t tired making the mistake of sleeping on his flight home from exhaustion from the race.

You were lying in bed, duvet torn off of you face smushed into the pillow, turned to the side. You had one leg cocked up and the other straight. Oscar walking quietly into the bedroom seeing this sight had him even more awake.

He gently placed his suitcase down not wanting to wake you up.

You were wearing the sleepwear that he found the sexiest and it was like you’d done that on purpose. It wasn’t anything skimpy like silk or lacy. It was a pair of white underwear that rested on your hips showing off your figure deliciously. And then a low cut cropped hoodie.

Everything just looked so … he couldn’t even describe it! But he wanted you so badly. It had been over three weeks since he’d gotten any kind of intimacy with you. You’d both had an unforgettable night before he’d left but since then you’d both been far to busy to relieve yourself.

Now that he was here with you, seeing you looking so soft and fuckable he couldn’t help himself when he felt himself strain against his tightening jeans.

He couldn’t help the way he stood onto next to you, running his hand down the drive of your spine before running down the outline of the underwear from your hip to your bum.

You’d both spoken about doing this before but you’d never actually got round to it, as you normally tried to force yourself to stay up to wait for him to come home or he’d be too exhausted to do anything by the time he was there.

But now was the perfect time, you were laying there all innocent and unassuming. This was his moment.

He took his jeans off, not wanting to make you wake up from him trying to awkwardly shuffle his jeans off when he was weighing down the bed and moving the mattress.

He takes both jeans and boxers off discarding them on the floor before climbing up into the bed behind you. He holds your hips testing the waters by rubbing his hands up and down a bit rougher before gripping either side, moving you so you were more on your stomach. As he straddled you, his hands grazed over your underwear on your lower back, giving it a testing snap, but you only stirred in the way Oscar was used to you stirring, one that he knew you wouldn’t wake from easily.

Through the fabric of your panties he gives a testing rub of your clit, and almost as if you knew he was there in your sleep and you knew what he wanted your hips arched in a way that gave him easier access. He get rubbing until he could feel a wet patch of your slick form through the white panties you were wearing. If only you were wearing grey right now and it was more visible, he’d be a different animal.

Little soft sight and whines came from you in your sleep, until you called him name.

“Oscar” you moaned and he stopped thinking he’d woken you up but all he saw when he looked at your face against the pillow was a small furrow in your brows and your lips slightly parted.

“That’s it baby” he whispers softly.

He goes back to rubbing your clit until you roll a little bit, shaking in your sleep. He pulls away, knowing that an orgasm would most likely wake you up and he wanted to be inside you when that happened.

Pulling the underwear to the side and pulling your hips up a tiny little bit, he slips into your wetness. The sound was ludicrous, but he had to bite his lip to hold back his own moan as he bottomed out in you, your walls already clamping down on the unexpected intrusion.

He keeps a nice grip on your hips starting to thrust in and out, very softly that at one point it felt so good he had to bring his own hand up to cover his mouth as he let out his own grunt. He kept it up there for a while until he started to get needier and rougher to reach his high.

His hands had an incredibly strong grip on your lips and he’d lifted you up further to get a better angle in the relaxed doggy style he currently had you in.

“Argh fuck” he slipped up. And that when your mind started to wake up, you thought it was just an incredible dream you were having about your boyfriend. But as you started to come too, the feeling of something pushing in and out of you became far to realistic.

The feeling washed over you like a ton of bricks and you moaned at the feeling.

“Oscar?” You half moan, half question as you try look round, seeing your boyfriend behind you, thrusting in and out.

“Oh fuck, Osc. Missed you so fucking much. Fuck please baby” you cry as his thrusts get quicker knowing now your awake. He hits one spot that has you clamping tight around him, your hands fisting into the sheet and pillow as you moan out his name once more.

He shortly follows, hips stuttering into you before collapsing next to you, tucking you Into his embrace holding you close to him as he lets a breath out.

“Welcome home” you mutter sleepily as he kisses your head.

“I want to come home like this always” he sighs.

Taglist:

@littlebitchsposts @hockey-racing-fubol @laura-naruto-fan1998 @22yuki @simxican @sinofwriting @lewisroscoelove @cmleitora @daemyratwst @lauralarsen @the-untamed-soul @thewulf @itsjustkhaos @purplephantomwolf @chasing-liberosis @summissss @gulphulp @starfusionsworld @jspitwall @sierruhhhh @georgeparisole @youcannotcancelquidditch @tallbrownhairsarcastic @ourteenagetragedy @peachiicherries @formulas-bitch @cherry-piee @spilled-coffee-cup @mehrmonga @eiraethh @curseofhecate @alliwantisadonut @dark-night-sky-99 @i-wish-this-was-me @tallrock35 @butterfly-lover @barnestatic @landossainz @darleneslane @barcelonaloverf1life @r0nnsblog @ilove-tswizzle @laneyspaulding19 @malynn @landosgirlxoxo @marie0v @yourbane @teamnovalak @nikfigueiredo @fionaschicken @0picels0 @tinydeskwriter @ironmaiden1313 @splaterparty0-0 @formula1mount

[inkdrinkerworld]

imagine reader being in rogue’s places in the scene which logan stabs her accidentally

The shock in your voice when you whimper his name has Logan’s eyes snapping open.

“Fuck,” he isn’t sure what to do with his hands. Should he leave his claws out, should he retract them?

He doesn’t know what to do and the moment you cough and blood sputters out of your mouth he feels his heart rate skyrocket.

You can’t die. Not because of him. He can’t kill you.

“It’s okay baby,” there’s blood pooling in the corner of your mouth and Logan wants to curse, he also wants to grab you and hold you close but shifting the claws inside of you scared him more.

His brain can’t comprehend what he’s done.

“It’s not fucking okay!” He swears, but then your hand reaches to his face and he feels it. “I stabbed you.”

“It’s okay Lo, just breathe.” And breathe he does. Every breath he takes helps calm him down as you murmur under your breath and a pink glow takes over the room.

Logan watches as your skin repairs itself, his claws retracting slowing. When you’re all healed up, you slump into him with a ragged breath.

The blood in your mouth doesn’t get reabsorbed in your body so when the wound is closed, Logan wipes it away with a shaking hand.

“I’m okay,” you murmur, eyes tired all of a sudden. “I’m okay.”

He nods, tears pricking his eyes as he presses his forehead to your collarbone. “I’m sorry bub, I’m so fucking sorry.”

Your hand touches his hair, “It was an accident. It’s all okay.”

Logan kisses any bit of skin he can reach, holding you like a piece of fine china as he lays you down on the bed.

“Maybe I should go back to my room tonight, yeah?” He says roughly, eyes not leaving the part of your torso where his claws had been.

“No, want you to stay.” You yawn, your body more tired now that you’d used your powers to close such a large wound. “Please, Logan?”

He sighs, resigned to giving you what you want for now at least. “Just till you fall asleep, bub.”

You nod, knowing this is the best he can do right now. “Okay,” you turn into him the moment he’s on the bed again, head on his chest as his arms circle your back. “Love you, Logan.”

He presses his lips to your hairline. “I love you too bub, get some sleep.”

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Google’s enshittification memos

[Note, 9 October 2023: Google disputes the veracity of this claim, but has declined to provide the exhibits and testimony to support its claims. Read more about this here.]

When I think about how the old, good internet turned into the enshitternet, I imagine a series of small compromises, each seemingly reasonable at the time, each contributing to a cultural norm of making good things worse, and worse, and worse.

Think about Unity President Marc Whitten's nonpology for his company's disastrous rug-pull, in which they declared that everyone who had paid good money to use their tool to make a game would have to keep paying, every time someone downloaded that game:

The most fundamental thing that we’re trying to do is we’re building a sustainable business for Unity. And for us, that means that we do need to have a model that includes some sort of balancing change, including shared success.

https://www.wired.com/story/unity-walks-back-policies-lost-trust/

"Shared success" is code for, "If you use our tool to make money, we should make money too." This is bullshit. It's like saying, "We just want to find a way to share the success of the painters who use our brushes, so every time you sell a painting, we want to tax that sale." Or "Every time you sell a house, the company that made the hammer gets to wet its beak."

And note that they're not talking about shared risk here – no one at Unity is saying, "If you try to make a game with our tools and you lose a million bucks, we're on the hook for ten percent of your losses." This isn't partnership, it's extortion.

How did a company like Unity – which became a market leader by making a tool that understood the needs of game developers and filled them – turn into a protection racket? One bad decision at a time. One rationalization and then another. Slowly, and then all at once.

When I think about this enshittification curve, I often think of Google, a company that had its users' backs for years, which created a genuinely innovative search engine that worked so well it seemed like *magic, a company whose employees often had their pick of jobs, but chose the "don't be evil" gig because that mattered to them.

People make fun of that "don't be evil" motto, but if your key employees took the gig because they didn't want to be evil, and then you ask them to be evil, they might just quit. Hell, they might make a stink on the way out the door, too:

https://theintercept.com/2018/09/13/google-china-search-engine-employee-resigns/

Google is a company whose founders started out by publishing a scientific paper describing their search methodology, in which they said, "Oh, and by the way, ads will inevitably turn your search engine into a pile of shit, so we're gonna stay the fuck away from them":

http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf

Those same founders retained a controlling interest in the company after it went IPO, explaining to investors that they were going to run the business without having their elbows jostled by shortsighted Wall Street assholes, so they could keep it from turning into a pile of shit:

https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/ipo-letter/

And yet, it's turned into a pile of shit. Google search is so bad you might as well ask Jeeves. The company's big plan to fix it? Replace links to webpages with florid paragraphs of chatbot nonsense filled with a supremely confident lies:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/14/googles-ai-hype-circle/

How did the company get this bad? In part, this is the "curse of bigness." The company can't grow by attracting new users. When you have 90%+ of the market, there are no new customers to sign up. Hypothetically, they could grow by going into new lines of business, but Google is incapable of making a successful product in-house and also kills most of the products it buys from other, more innovative companies:

https://killedbygoogle.com/

Theoretically, the company could pursue new lines of business in-house, and indeed, the current leaders of companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Apple are all execs who figured out how to get the whole company to do something new, and were elevated to the CEO's office, making each one a billionaire and sealing their place in history.

It is for this very reason that any exec at a large firm who tries to make a business-wide improvement gets immediately and repeatedly knifed by all their colleagues, who correctly reason that if someone else becomes CEO, then they won't become CEO. Machiavelli was an optimist:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

With no growth from new customers, and no growth from new businesses, "growth" has to come from squeezing workers (say, laying off 12,000 engineers after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years), or business customers (say, by colluding with Facebook to rig the ad market with the Jedi Blue conspiracy), or end-users.

Now, in theory, we might never know exactly what led to the enshittification of Google. In theory, all of compromises, debates and plots could be lost to history. But tech is not an oral culture, it's a written one, and techies write everything down and nothing is ever truly deleted.

Time and again, Big Tech tells on itself. Think of FTX's main conspirators all hanging out in a group chat called "Wirefraud." Amazon naming its program targeting weak, small publishers the "Gazelle Project" ("approach these small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle”). Amazon documenting the fact that users were unknowingly signing up for Prime and getting pissed; then figuring out how to reduce accidental signups, then deciding not to do it because it liked the money too much. Think of Zuck emailing his CFO in the middle of the night to defend his outsized offer to buy Instagram on the basis that users like Insta better and Facebook couldn't compete with them on quality.

It's like every Big Tech schemer has a folder on their desktop called "Mens Rea" filled with files like "Copy_of_Premeditated_Murder.docx":

https://doctorow.medium.com/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself-f7f0eb6d215a?sk=351f8a54ab8e02d7340620e5eec5024d

Right now, Google's on trial for its sins against antitrust law. It's a hard case to make. To secure a win, the prosecutors at the DoJ Antitrust Division are going to have to prove what was going on in Google execs' minds when the took the actions that led to the company's dominance. They're going to have to show that the company deliberately undertook to harm its users and customers.

Of course, it helps that Google put it all in writing.

Last week, there was a huge kerfuffile over the DoJ's practice of posting its exhibits from the trial to a website each night. This is a totally normal thing to do – a practice that dates back to the Microsoft antitrust trial. But Google pitched a tantrum over this and said that the docs the DoJ were posting would be turned into "clickbait." Which is another way of saying, "the public would find these documents very interesting, and they would be damning to us and our case":

https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/secrecy-is-systemic

After initially deferring to Google, Judge Amit Mehta finally gave the Justice Department the greenlight to post the document. It's up. It's wild:

https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-09/416692.pdf

The document is described as "notes for a course on communication" that Google VP for Finance Michael Roszak prepared. Roszak says he can't remember whether he ever gave the presentation, but insists that the remit for the course required him to tell students "things I didn't believe," and that's why the document is "full of hyperbole and exaggeration."

OK.

But here's what the document says: "search advertising is one of the world's greatest business models ever created…illicit businesses (cigarettes or drugs) could rival these economics…[W]e can mostly ignore the demand side…(users and queries) and only focus on the supply side of advertisers, ad formats and sales."

It goes on to say that this might be changing, and proposes a way to balance the interests of the search and ads teams, which are at odds, with search worrying that ads are pushing them to produce "unnatural search experiences to chase revenue."

"Unnatural search experiences to chase revenue" is a thinly veiled euphemism for the prophetic warnings in that 1998 Pagerank paper: "The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users." Or, more plainly, "ads will turn our search engine into a pile of shit."

And, as Roszak writes, Google is "able to ignore one of the fundamental laws of economics…supply and demand." That is, the company has become so dominant and cemented its position so thoroughly as the default search engine across every platforms and system that even if it makes its search terrible to goose revenues, users won't leave. As Lily Tomlin put it on SNL: "We don't have to care, we're the phone company."

In the enshittification cycle, companies first lure in users with surpluses – like providing the best search results rather than the most profitable ones – with an eye to locking them in. In Google's case, that lock-in has multiple facets, but the big one is spending billions of dollars – enough to buy a whole Twitter, every single year – to be the default search everywhere.

Google doesn't buy its way to dominance because it has the very best search results and it wants to shield you from inferior competitors. The economically rational case for buying default position is that preventing competition is more profitable than succeeding by outperforming competitors. The best reason to buy the default everywhere is that it lets you lower quality without losing business. You can "ignore the demand side, and only focus on advertisers."

For a lot of people, the analysis stops here. "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product." Google locks in users and sells them to advertisers, who are their co-conspirators in a scheme to screw the rest of us.

But that's not right. For one thing, paying for a product doesn't mean you won't be the product. Apple charges a thousand bucks for an iPhone and then nonconsensually spies on every iOS user in order to target ads to them (and lies about it):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

John Deere charges six figures for its tractors, then runs a grift that blocks farmers from fixing their own machines, and then uses their control over repair to silence farmers who complain about it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/31/dealers-choice/#be-a-shame-if-something-were-to-happen-to-it

Fair treatment from a corporation isn't a loyalty program that you earn by through sufficient spending. Companies that can sell you out, will sell you out, and then cry victim, insisting that they were only doing their fiduciary duty for their sacred shareholders. Companies are disciplined by fear of competition, regulation or – in the case of tech platforms – customers seizing the means of computation and installing ad-blockers, alternative clients, multiprotocol readers, etc:

https://doctorow.medium.com/an-audacious-plan-to-halt-the-internets-enshittification-and-throw-it-into-reverse-3cc01e7e4604?sk=85b3f5f7d051804521c3411711f0b554

Which is where the next stage of enshittification comes in: when the platform withdraws the surplus it had allocated to lure in – and then lock in – business customers (like advertisers) and reallocate it to the platform's shareholders.

For Google, there are several rackets that let it screw over advertisers as well as searchers (the advertisers are paying for the product, and they're also the product). Some of those rackets are well-known, like Jedi Blue, the market-rigging conspiracy that Google and Facebook colluded on:

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

But thanks to the antitrust trial, we're learning about more of these. Megan Gray – ex-FTC, ex-DuckDuckGo – was in the courtroom last week when evidence was presented on Google execs' panic over a decline in "ad generating searches" and the sleazy gimmick they came up with to address it: manipulating the "semantic matching" on user queries:

https://www.wired.com/story/google-antitrust-lawsuit-search-results/

When you send a query to Google, it expands that query with terms that are similar – for example, if you search on "Weds" it might also search for "Wednesday." In the slides shown in the Google trial, we learned about another kind of semantic matching that Google performed, this one intended to turn your search results into "a twisted shopping mall you can’t escape."

Here's how that worked: when you ran a query like "children's clothing," Google secretly appended the brand name of a kids' clothing manufacturer to the query. This, in turn, triggered a ton of ads – because rival brands will have bought ads against their competitors' name (like Pepsi buying ads that are shown over queries for Coke).

Here we see surpluses being taken away from both end-users and business customers – that is, searchers and advertisers. For searchers, it doesn't matter how much you refine your query, you're still going to get crummy search results because there's an unkillable, hidden search term stuck to your query, like a piece of shit that Google keeps sticking to the sole of your shoe.

But for advertisers, this is also a scam. They're paying to be matched to users who search on a brand name, and you didn't search on that brand name. It's especially bad for the company whose name has been appended to your search, because Google has a protection racket where the company that matches your search has to pay extra in order to show up overtop of rivals who are worse matches. Both the matching company and those rivals have given Google a credit-card that Google gets to bill every time a user searches on the company's name, and Google is just running fraudulent charges through those cards.

And, of course, Google put this in writing. I mean, of course they did. As we learned from the documentary The Incredibles, supervillains can't stop themselves from monologuing, and in big, sprawling monopolists, these monologues have to transmitted electronically – and often indelibly – to far-flung co-cabalists.

As Gray points out, this is an incredibly blunt enshittification technique: "it hadn’t even occurred to me that Google just flat out deletes queries and replaces them with ones that monetize better." We don't know how long Google did this for or how frequently this bait-and-switch was deployed.

But if this is a blunt way of Google smashing its fist down on the scales that balance search quality against ad revenues, there's plenty of subtler ways the company could sneak a thumb on there. A Google exec at the trial rhapsodized about his company's "contract with the user" to deliver an "honest results policy," but given how bad Google search is these days, we're left to either believe he's lying or that Google sucks at search.

The paper trail offers a tantalizing look at how a company went from doing something that was so good it felt like a magic trick to being "able to ignore one of the fundamental laws of economics…supply and demand," able to "ignore the demand side…(users and queries) and only focus on the supply side of advertisers."

What's more, this is a system where everyone loses (except for Google): this isn't a grift run by Google and advertisers on users – it's a grift Google runs on everyone.

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/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!